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Postmortem for a Dead Newspaper

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the what-not-to-do dept.

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."

3 of 219 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Sad to hear of the RMN by mcgrew · · Score: 3, Funny

    They just don't kill trees to put out their paper, sacrificing electrons instead.

    *sniff* that's TERRIBLE! *sob* Poor little electrons...

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  2. Re:Sad to hear of the RMN by WillAffleckUW · · Score: 2, Funny

    Well, we tried to sacrifice positrons, but you saw what happened to the Mount St Helens newspaper when we did that ...

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  3. Re:Keep in mind, though by mcgrew · · Score: 3, Funny

    I keep seeing RMN and instead of thinking "Rocky Mountain News" I think "Richard Milhouse Nixon". Damn, I'm getting old =(

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