Glimrende gennemgang af at der faktisk godt kan være forretning i gratis nyheder - hvis bare ens omkostningsbase ikke er en jernkugle om foden. Would you buy a newspaper? When word got out that the Montreal Gazette was being put up for sale along with the entire Canwest newspaper family, I immediately asked one of my business partners over at Twist Image if our company might be interested in purchasing it. He laughed at me. Not because we could not afford it (the truth is, we can't afford it, but we could probably find the right people and raise the money to do it), but because there was no logical connection in his brain between what we're doing here as a digital marketing agency and how that fits with owning a local newspaper (my background as a magazine publisher didn't seem to sway him either). He was right, even though The Gazette is profitable. In fact, for a medium-sized business like us, we would love to have the kind of profitability this newspaper has. But, the other truth is that Canwest is a whole different type of business. The economic recession, that reduced traditional mass media advertising, along with a newspaper's many legacy systems which pre-date the Internet and mobile device era - unions, printing plants, trucks and people for distribution, leases, office space, etc. - makes things seem more dire and urgent. The new business models that come into play also confuse the newspaper (and publishing) industry even further. There is no one single thing that is going to save the newspaper industry (like the Internet or the iPad). The Internet and free news on the Web is not the reason that people are subscribing, reading or caring less for their local newspaper (in fact, the plight of the publishing industry has been a hot topic of debate long before we had Google, iPhones and Twitter). We tend to forget how hard the publishing industry lobbied for more attention and care when they began to discover the masses were reading a whole lot less when compared to watching television. Free news on the Internet is a business model. Just last week, Le Devoir held a conference in Montreal on the future of independent media as that daily French newspaper celebrates its centenary year. Writing out of the conference, The Gazette's Jason Magder cited Torstar chairman John Honderich as saying that giving away content online has turned out to be "a bad idea." With all due respect to all of the traditional news outlets out there in the word, that's simply not true. Free news online is a very viable business model, and there are many big media publishers making lots of money online offering free news (check out The Huffington Post, Mashable, TMZ, Media Bistro, The Daily Beast and many more). When looking at how these free, digital-only publishing houses work compared to the traditional news media, the differences are staggering. From how the journalists are found, managed and paid to the marketing and advertising models, to the actual management infrastructure, one would not be hard-pressed to say that they look nothing like the industry that they inherited and digitized. Maybe the newspaper industry has to look well beyond the current model of simply copying-and-pasting their print content and publishing it online to re-imagining what publishing means in a world where 20 people and a WordPress publishing platform can do the job using text, images, audio and video that it used to take 200 people to do in a fraction of the time and cost. A Canadian Press article out of the Devoir conference noted, "Part of the rush to offer free content online was spurred by the advent of so-called citizen journalism, touted as a democratic expansion of the media industry to non-professionals. But some argue citizen journalism won't be able to fill the gap left by mainstream outlets who are reducing their operations or closing down altogether. Persephone Miel, who wrote a major Harvard study on online journalism, said most citizen journalism deals with electoral politics, popular culture, technology, and little else. Ignored are more nuanced and weighty topics such as public policy. 'The question is not the survival of the newspaper,' she told an audience at the conference. 'The problem is who is going to produce... the kinds of journalism that isn't getting produced by online publications.'" The answer might be that news which serves the public good needs to be funded much in the same way education, healthcare, libraries, the police, etc., is handled, and that news doesn't, necessarily, have to be a media format that has both revenue and advertising dollars tied to it. It can simply be something that is supported by the public for the public good. Many pundits (do a quick search for people like Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis and Clay Shirky) have uniformly stated that: Journalism will survive the institution it was created for. All of this might sound weird, and you might be wondering what this has to do with your business, but it is all connected. How we communicate, share, and connect is tied to the media channels that keep us informed. As they begin to deal with both the digitization and fragmentation of their industry, you can't help but wonder what will happen when it hits your industry as well (if it hasn't already). What's your take? The above posting is my twice-monthly column for the Montreal Gazette and Vancouver Sun newspapers called, New Business - Six Pixels of Separation. I cross-post it here with all the links and tags for your reading pleasure, but you can check out the original versions online here: - Montreal Gazette - Why I won't buy the Montreal Gazette. - Vancouver Sun - not available. Tags: advertising business column business model canadian press canwest citizen journalism clay shirky conference digital marketing agency distribution electoral politics free content online free news google harvard huffington post independent media industry internet ipad iphone jason magder jay rosen jeff jarvis john honderich journalism journalist le devoir local newspaper magazine management marketing mashable mass media media bistro media channel media format media industry media publisher mobile montreal gazette news news media news outlet newspaper newspaper column office space online content online journalism online publication paid content persephone miel popular culture printing plant public policy publisher publishing publishing industry publishing platform subscription technology television the daily beast tmz torstar traditional media twist image twitter union vancouver sun wordpress

Det vil sige: Hvis de foreslår en model, der hedder A-B=C så forslå dem i stedet én, der hedder A-C=B. Eller sagt på en anden måde: Vend om på risikoen, så den ikke ligger på dig men i stedet ligger på partneren og se så, hvad der sker.

I mange tilfælde vil partneren ikke synes, det er nogen god idé. Så er det ikke nogen god partner for dig, for det sender bare et signal om, at partneren kun er interesseret i at mele sin egen kage, og den slags er i min bog ikke noget partnerskab. I enkelte tilfælde vil partneren kunne se pointen og fornuften, indgå i en dialog, og I kan sammen finde frem til en rigtig god løsning. Så er relationen og tilliden allerede etableret – og dermed basis for et rigtig godt partnerskab. Og så lige to spørgsmål til alle dem, der foreslår en model og så afviser at vende den på hovedet (bare så vi ikke spilder hinandens tid):

Hvis I ikke selv er med på den, hvorfor skulle jeg så være det? Er der nogen særlig grund til, I tror, jeg skulle være så uintelligent?

Det sidste kan meget vel være tilfældet, men i givet fald vil jeg gerne vide det, så jeg kan blive klogere.

Haha, sjov anekdote der bare viser, at det enkle og simple ofte virker bedst.

How do you talk about your business's strategy so that your employees get it? Well, you've probably heard the phrase "Keep it simple, stupid." And often the subtext of that is: "Keep it simple, because your people are stupid." But the point of simplicity isn't to dumb things down. You're not trying to solve a comprehension problem. You're trying to solve a problem called decision paralysis. [twistage bf7bacef10a39] Decision paralysis is a finding from psychology that says that the more choices we have, the more likely we are to freeze up and go with the path of least resistance. Here's one simple study: At a grocery store, there was a table where customers could sample 24 different kinds of jams. It was a big hit. Another day, there was a similar table with only 6 kinds of jams. It wasn't quite as popular. But here's the twist: When they counted up how many jars of jam sold, the table with only 6 jams outsold the one with 24 jams 10-to-1. When you've got 24 options, it's just too hard to choose. That's decision paralysis. Think about the tensions in your business that could cause decision paralysis. Trust me, they're a lot worse than choosing between strawberry jam and boysenberry: You've got tradeoffs between serving customers and minimizing costs. Revenue growth versus maximizing profitability. Product quality versus speed to market. Fold together lots of these tensions and you've got a surefire recipe for paralysis. So what do you do? Get simple. I met a guy named Hoover Adams who founded the Dunn Daily Record--the local newspaper in Dunn, North Carolina. It's one of the most successful newspapers in the country--on average, every household buys 1.12 copies of the Daily Record. Apparently some couples have a hard time sharing. So I asked Adams what his secret was, and he said he'd had the same strategy for 40 years. It boiled down to three things: names, names, and names. What he meant was that, every day, he demands that his staff feature as many people from Dunn as possible. Adams will literally flip through the paper and count the names. And his point is: Look, we can't compete with USA Today or the Washington Post. What we can do that nobody else can is tell you what your neighbors are up to. So, if you're an editor choosing between a beautiful photo of the local park at sunset or a really boring photo of 9 people around a conference room table, which are you gonna publish? The boring one, because it lets you mention nine names in the caption. With the "names, names, names" mantra, Hoover Adams is helping his people make decision the same way that he would. And that's the value of simplicity--it helps to break up the decision paralysis your employees face and ensure that everyone is rowing the same direction. If you're intrigued by this discussion, go to our home Web site--I've included a lot of other resources you can check out, including more examples of simple strategies. For more on this topic: Start here, with the column my brother and I wrote about making your strategy simple enough to be actionable. For more depth, see the Simple chapter of Made to Stick--it includes the full story of the Dunn Daily Record ("names, names, names"). We also wrote a free piece called "Talking Strategy," which discusses the importance of clear internal strategic communication. For more on decision paralysis, check out Barry Schwarz's excellent book The Paradox of Choice. Sheena Iyengar of Columbia is the pioneer of research on decision paralysis.

Tager hatten af for Fynske Medier, der om nogen har forstået at finde andre indtægtsstrømme end digitale annoncer.