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Postmortem for a Dead Newspaper
Techdirt points out a great postmortem for the Rocky Mountain News, a newspaper that ended up shutting down because they couldn't adapt to a world beyond print. While long, the talk (in both video and print) is incredibly candid coming from someone who lived through it and shares at least some portion of the blame. "It seems like pretty much everything was based on looking backwards, not forward. There was little effort to figure out how to better enable a community, or any recognition that the community of people who read the paper were the organizations true main asset. ... The same game is playing out not just in newspapers, but in a number of other businesses as well. Like the Rocky Mountain News, those businesses are looking backwards and defining themselves on the wrong terms, while newer startups don't have such legacy issues to deal with."
They just don't kill trees to put out their paper, sacrificing electrons instead.
*sniff* that's TERRIBLE! *sob* Poor little electrons...
Free Martian Whores!
...well, you know. Hey, I'm a big fan of print newspapers. In fact, when I subscribed to the Wall Street Journal Online, they included a handy print copy for me 6 days of the week. Now, of course the print copy is always a day behind what I've already read online. However, just the other day I sold a few items on eBay, and without my print copy handy, I likely would have had to dole out some serious cheddar on bubble-wrap. True story.
Well, we tried to sacrifice positrons, but you saw what happened to the Mount St Helens newspaper when we did that ...
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I keep seeing RMN and instead of thinking "Rocky Mountain News" I think "Richard Milhouse Nixon". Damn, I'm getting old =(
Free Martian Whores!
Classic .. a guy using the name "Archangel Michael" calls people out for being "sanctimonious"