The Christian Science Monitor’s John Yemma has a wonderful post seeing the demise of Encarta as a cautionary tale – well, it’s too late for caution; a lesson – for newspapers.
That lesson is that general knowledge, whether under the brand name of a giant like Britannica or Microsoft, can’t withstand an effort that was developed specifically for the Internet and that harnesses gifted amateurs.If all the big newspapers at once adopted a pay model, some upstart would come along and use a small group of journalists and a larger group of Wikipedia-like amateurs to build a multimedia newspaper. Like Wikipedia, it would be the butt of countless jokes about unreliability.
Maybe it would even report on its own unreliability.
But it would grow stronger because it would be organically constituted on the World Wide Web. That’s the power of open-source knowledge. And that’s the challenge the news media face as they dive into the Internet:
You can’t take the old model with you. You can take your organization’s values with you. But you can’t take its work habits, as we are learning this week in our first week of Web-first Monitor.
The Web is its own universe with its own rules.
The role of classic newspaper is constant changing and I am really curious what will come next. What for this time it is sure that printed media do not have an easy life.
[...] que está tan de moda plantearse el futuro del periodismo, me llama la atención que una de las principales fuentes de ingresos de los periódicos en [...]
Yemma wrote: “The Web is its own universe with its own rules.”
Wrong! Or, irrelevant… It’s not the “web” which is the issue here. What he’s talking about is simply a key attribute of “disruptive innovations” in ANY sphere. He should read carefully the work of Clayton Christiansen at Harvard (“Innovators Dilemna” and its many sequels…) Christiansen makes it clear that virtually all truly disruptive innovations are viewed as “not as good” when they are first introduced. In fact, it is this “not as good” attribute that ensures that such innovations are “disruptive” since established players will ignore the “not as good” innovations and thus provide the breathing space needed by the innovators in order to crush the established players. If an innovation ever looked “good enough” to address the markets of the established players or even “better than current solutions,” the established players would inevitably rise up from their slumber and pour resources into either implementing the innovation or competing with it. Thus, it is the “not as good” stuff that turns out to be disruptive — because it is ignored.
Every time a newspaper guy says online stuff, or whatever, is “not as good,” you should imagine a “sell” signal for their stock symbol.
bob wyman
Bob: Thanks for citing Christiansen’s fundamental and widely understood points about disruptive innovation. I couldn’t agree more that that is the uber theme that the Web is the current manifestation of. I’m not sure I get your point, however, about why this makes it “wrong” or “irrelevantt” to say that the Web is its own universe with its own rules. One true thing doesn’t need to negate another.
I’m a “newspaper guy,” yes, but if you look at Jeff’s excerpt from my blog post I’m not positing the “not as good” argument. I’m saying quite the opposite. Open-source knowledge is superior in many ways.
John
> You can take your organization’s values with you. But you can’t take its work habits ….
You can try to take your values, but, like your work habits, they may not work on the web.
> The Web is its own universe with its own rules.
That applies to values as well as work habits.
According to this statement “You can’t take the old model with you” I have read some news concerning newspaper that the AP will force to check and control their news broadcasting. This means the free news broadcaster who don´t pay to AP will be punished – in my opinion is this the last try of an old model to keep it as it is.