Walter Isaacson does journalism a grave disservice

Earlier this month, former Time CEO and current head of the Aspen Institute Walter Isaacson wrote a long piece in Time, called “How to Save Your Newspaper.” His argument was simple: Newspapers must start charging for their online content. The piece set off a tizzy in the journalism blogosphere, with bloggers and readers chiming in left and right about whether news organizations should, in fact, make readers pay. Charlie Rose even hosted an entire show on the future of journalism, with Isaacson as one of the guests.

The problem is: They've been talking about the wrong thing.

All the energy put into debating whether news organizations should charge for online content was wasted effort. You can’t talk about whether you should charge users of your product until you’ve created a product that a consumer would even consider paying for. The major problem in journalism today is not that news organizations haven’t figured out how to run their businesses off online ad revenue. The major problem in journalism today is that news organizations have not stopped to revamp the product they offer.

Sure, many news organizations have “added on.” They’ve added blogs. They’ve added slideshows. They’ve added video. But they haven’t revamped the core product. For the most part, they’ve simply put online the type of “product” they used to place in their print editions. Is City Hall doing something of note? Fine, write a 10-inch inverted pyramid story. But that’s not a product people want in the online world. In order to have anything to charge for, newspapers need to go back to the drawing board and rethink their “offering.”*

This idea hasn’t occurred to news organizations because they’ve simply assumed that all they need to do to “go digital” was to put online what they used to place in print. Problem is: readers (“users”) have different expectations of what online should provide them than what they expected from print. The same way that users expect far more functionality from a cell phone today than they ever expected from a landline. Landlines at most could store a few numbers and display the number of an incoming caller. But there’s no way a cell phone customer today would ever buy a cell phone that did nothing more than store a handful of numbers and display the number of an incoming caller. Cell phone users expect far more than that, and cell phones must deliver, or get out of the business.

Here’s an example of that means for print. A little while back, the city of San Francisco announced that, from March to November, it was going to do an inspection of all sidewalks in the city and issue repair notices where broken sidewalks need to be replaced. This was significant. Every property owner is responsible for the sidewalk in front of their buildings. Thousands of property owners—homeowners and businesses alike—would likely be affected by the notices. And given the cost of replacing sidewalks, that was going to mean at least several thousands of dollars out of pocket per property owner.

I learned about this online, from a San Francisco newspaper. As you might expect, all they did was post a 10-inch (probably more like seven) inverted pyramid story about it. Which is what you would produce if you were putting the story in print. But that’s the wrong way to go about it online. The news organization could have created a much more valuable offering. But they didn’t, probably because it never occurred to them they should rethink how to deliver this story online vs. how they would have done it in print.

So let’s do that now. Pretend, for starters, that you had never grown up in the print world, that you had grown up in the digital world. Now ask yourself, as a “digital native”: How would you do a story online about the city’s plans to perform sidewalk inspections?

• Would you, perhaps, include an interactive map, showing which streets the city was going to be inspecting when?
  
  Presumably the city had a schedule of where their inspectors were going to be when. Why wouldn’t you, as a service to your readers, post a map where homeowners could click their streets and find out when the inspectors would be there? That way they would know whether they needed to start gathering their money now or whether they had a few months before their notice would come.
  



• Would you include a calculator, to help homeowners calculate how much replacing their sidewalk was going to cost?
  
  Sidewalks in San Francisco are made up of squares. Contractors generally tabulate the cost of a job by multiplying the number of squares to be replaced by a standard price-per-square. An online calculator would allow readers to plug in the number of broken squares outside their homes and have it spit out a ballpark figure for how much the job would cost.

These are just a few, tiny, tiny examples of how news organizations might offer a product online that readers would find truly valuable—one that, if all the news were built this way—readers might indeed think was worth laying down a few pennies for.

So this is the point: The news business does not have a future online unless it rethinks how it does news online. You can talk about making people pay, but until you’ve created something people might be willing to pay for, such discussions are a waste of time.

Which is why Walter Isaacson—and others who think and advocate like him—are doing journalism a grave disservice. The more time we collectively spend talking about whether readers should pay for journalism before we’ve created something that they’d want to pay for, the more energy we’re wasting and the longer it’s going to take to find the future of journalism.


* “Offering” is a term used in the business world to describe the thing you’re putting out in the world that you want people to pay for. A Happy Meal is an offering. An oil change is an offering. A 5-day cruise with buffets included but drinks extra is an offering. Businesses spend a lot of time figuring out what should be in their offering in order to create something that people want (in order to maximize number of customers) and will pay for (in order to, at a minimum, break even or, better, make a healthy profit).

Timesmen in the Twilight Zone

New York had a short squib a while back on how Gay Talese is working with Leslie Gelb on a documentary about the New York Times' "struggles in the digital age." Talese's quotes are a case study in the faulty thinking that's hobbling journalism's ability to find its way forward.

Let's go through them, one by one. And, to help make the point, let's imagine that, instead of a journalist at the turn of this century, he's a horse-and-buggyman at the turn of the last one, when the automobile came on the scene, and see what his quotes would have looked like.

New York: Why are you doing this documentary?

Talese today:

“[The documentary is] about why the Times is having difficulty attracting readers when in my opinion it’s still a very good paper, and about the difficulty of convincing young people to read it."

Horse-and-buggyman:

"We're trying to understand why we're having a hard time getting young people to drive buggies, when we still have so many fine horses and solid buggies."

New York: Is it because young people are reading the paper online? / Is it because young people are driving automobiles?

Talese today:

“We’re not interested in their Website. We’re interested in our insights as veterans of old-fashioned journalism.”

Horse-and-buggyman:

"We're not interested in their automobiles. We're interested in our insights as veteran horse and buggymen."

New York: Do you read the Times site occasionally? / Do you ever take trips in automobiles?

Talese today:

"Never, and I never will. I don’t even have a cell phone. I don’t deal with the technology. I don’t even know how to go into the Web. Maybe Gelb will do it. I insist on being with the people I’m writing about.”

Horse-and-buggyman:

"Never, and I never will. I've also never ridden in a train. And I have no interest in those flying machines either. I insist on having an initimate relationship with my mode of conveyance."

Am I getting my point across? Talese and others who think like him need to, put simply, get over it. Yes, the New York Times is a fine newspaper. But it's a newspaper. It doesn't matter how good it is. Its days are over. Those who care about journalism, and journalism done well, must let go of the thing that performed such a valuable service in the past, and of which they were masters, and use all their insights and intellectual power to figure out how to do all of this using the tools of the future.

Photo courtesy of: Welfl. Creative Commons license.

E&P got it wrong again

Joe Mathewson's column in Editor & Publisher a few days ago argues that a non-profit business model might be key to ensuring newspapers' survival.

Sadly, he's got it all wrong.

Mathewson is not necessarily wrong about the non-profit model. I don't have any immediate thoughts on the viability of the non-profit model of journalism. Instead, he's wrong because he thinks that the source of the newspaper industry's woes today lies in its economic model.

It doesn't.

The source of the industry's woes lies in the fact that it no longer creates a product readers want to consume. Yes, finances are contributing to the industry's decline. No one's arguing that declining ad revenues are not a factor. It's just that they're not the determining factor. The determining factor is the product itself.

The fact that Mathewson doesn't get this is encapsulated in the following comment: "A not-for-profit newspaper, of course, should have a vital online version." As if this online thingy were an afterthought, an appendage, a nice giveaway. This is archaic thinking.

A visionary thinker would put it the other way around: Increasingly, consumers like to get their news online. A new news organization should explore innovative ways of delivering news online -- and continue to print a dead-tree edition only if it can prove that the dead-tree edition has a sufficiently large customer base to merit its production.

It's a point I keep hammering away at: Until news leaders adopt the correct mindset, not only are they incapable of helping the news business find its future, they are a downright impediment to any progress.

Photo courtesy of Toots Fontaine. Creative Commons License.

Top Newspaper Stories of the Year -- Really?

Editor & Publisher released its annual list of what it considers the Top 10 Newspaper Industry Stories of the Year.

The problem with the list? All the stories are about, well, newspapers.

Not included:

• Josh Marshall/Talking Points Memo's Polk Award win for tracking down the US attorneys general firings (long before the traditional media even had a clue anything was amiss, btw).
  
  
• The rise of online organizations that are taking over the local news biz. Organizations like the Voice of San Diego, the St. Louis Beacon, and MinnPost.com.
  
  
• The creation of new experiments, like spot.us, to try to discover new models for reporting and funding the news.
  

E&P's list reflects the fact that they continue to equate the news business with the newspaper business. It's as if horse-and-buggy people at the turn of the (last) century equated horse and buggies with transportation and refused to recognize that motor vehicle also equated transportation.

As long as the leaders in the newspaper business continue to see the newspaper as the core unit in this business -- rather than the practice of gathering and disseminating information, no matter what shape it takes -- they will remain fundamentally incapable, and thus unqualified, to help this industry find its future.

Photo courtesy of Bombardier. Creative Commons license.

The single essential failure

"If the automakers' difficulties can be traced to a single, essential failure, it is their belief that they could avoid change."

-- Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker, Dec. 8, 2008

There's been a lot of ire in the journalism world about Jeff Jarvis blaming journalists for their current fate. But I have to agree with him. Newspapers' difficulties today can be chalked up to the same essential failure as the carmakers': The belief they could avoid change.

The difference, mainstream journalists will argue, is that journalism was producing a quality product. Unlike Detroit, which kept producing gas guzzlers when the tide was turning toward more fuel efficient vehicles, the mainstream media kept producing important, democracy-foundational journalism.

I will argue that the difference is not so great.

Both have continued to produce products that customers increasingly don't want. In journalism's case, the mainstream media may continue to be producing "important news," but it's not in the form readers want. The same way Detroit continues to produce "transportation," but not in the form drivers want. So this is the point: It doesn't matter how "valuable" your product is. If your customers don't want it, your future is limited. To survive, you have to evolve.

This is how the traditional media failed. They believed they didn't have to change, because their product was so valuable. They were wrong. The world does need what they produce. But we need it in the form in which we'll consume it.

Photo courtesy of Ikhlasul Amal. Creative Commons license.

It's not about finding a new way to pay for the same old thing

On Thursday, I wrote about how the SF Chron's editor is thinking about jacking up the paper's newsstand price in order to cover operating costs. Today, I'm reading a post on PaidContent.org about how maybe some newspapers should convert to non-profit status as a means of ensuring their viability.

Come on, people. This is just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

The problem is not the business model. It's the product offering. How do we know this? Declining readership.

If readership were staying level--or, better yet, soaring--then you'd know you had the right product on your hands. And in that case, yes, tinkering with the business model would be the right tactic to take to ensure one's survival.

But declining readership tells a different story. It means there are fewer customers out there who want what you're selling. There's not a single business school out there that will teach the principle: "When you have a declining customer base, fiddle with the price structure." Instead, they'll say, "When you have a declining customer base, you have a problem with your product." Solution: Go back to the drawing board and rethink your product.

Journalists and news observers who continue to point to the business model as the source of what ails us are doing this business a disservice. What we need to do is to rethink the newspaper altogether. We need to go back to the drawing board, to develop a real understanding of what our potential customer base (ie: all the potential readers in our communities) want out of a "news" organization--and how they want to receive news--and then come up with a new product offering altogether.

Photo courtesy of Toots Fontaine. Creative Commons license.

Why the San Francisco Chronicle is in trouble

The San Francisco Chronicle is in worse shape than I thought. Their editor, Ward Bushie, went on local public radio show "Forum" today to discuss the future of journalism in general and the Chron in particular, and his entire mindset left my jaw gaping open in incredulity. Showing an amazing lack of strategic sense, Bushie seemed to be saying he could only see two possible ways out of the hole: raise advertising rates or raise the cost of the paper.

Hmmm…. Talk about thinking "inside the box."

Bushie didn’t talk at all about possibly rethinking the paper—either the Chron itself or the idea of a newspaper in general. He apparently assumes that the Chron—or newspapers in general—should continue to provide the exact same product that they offer today (ie: the combined international/national/local/sports/business/home/life/entertainment package that they offer today). There was no: “Let’s go back to the drawing board and see where our competitive advantages lie and figure out what value we can deliver to our customers and then come up with a bunch of potential alternative incarnations that we’d be able to knock out of the ballpark and support financially.”

Instead, Bushie spoke about potentially jacking up the price of the paper, which is 75 cents today. And what was his rationale for thinking this was a reasonable idea? Most cups of coffee are about $2, he said. And the New York Times already costs $1.50. (At least it does if you’re in California. Maybe not on the streets of NYC.)

Such faulty thinking is flabbergasting. A thing isn’t worth more, just because other things are worth more. A thing is worth what your customer thinks it’s worth--what they’re willing to pay for it. Given the plummeting readership in newspapers in general, I sincerely doubt that the average San Franciscan would be willing to pay more for something they are increasingly less interested in.

The other revelation that further called into doubt Bushie's ability to lead the Chron into the future was that he repeatedly spoke about how much the paper been talking to “their readers” to find out what “their readers” want. But these, in fact, are the wrong people to be talking to. In order to survive, newspapers need to enlarge their customer base. Newspapers like the Chron should be talking to people who don’t already read (and buy) the newspaper. They should be trying to figure out how to convert those people from non-customers into customers. Normally, I fully support talking to and designing for your customers. But not when your existing customers don’t form a sufficient base.

In short, Bushie’s mindset seems to be this:
“The Chron is a great paper. We should figure out how to continue to support it, in its current incarnation, though maybe with a few tweaks.”

But to survive—or rather, to grow into a thriving news entity—a newspaper’s mindset today needs to be:
“What sorts of news are the citizens of our community interested in? What portions of those can we be really good at delivering? And how can we deliver them in a way that the members of our community will consume them?”

The full interview (available for download) is here.

Image courtesy of AlbySpace. Creative Commons license.

Minding the gap

Last week, The News Hour noted that with the termination of the Los Angeles Times' standalone Book Review section, only three newspapers still had separate book sections: The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, and the New York Times.

The News Hour invited Steve Wasserman, a past LA Times book review editor, to comment on the demise of book coverage in print and the explosion of literary commentary online.

Wasserman took the position that this demise is catastrophic: "Despite the robust nature or at least very excited nature of the conversations on the Internet, the best criticism still being written today is being published in magazines," he said. "It will be a long time before the Internet gives us a forum in which people unsupported by institutions can deliver us that kind of literary criticism."

In these few phrases, Wasserman makes himself both right and wrong.

He may be correct that the caliber of online criticism does not match the best of what is in print. I say "may be" simply because I don't follow this world, either in print or online. I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. And he may also be correct that it will be a long time before this caliber exists online. Again, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. (Though I suspect that at least some independent online reviewers would challenge him on that, perhaps including Kassia Krozer, editor of Booksquare.com, who was also on the show.)

Where he's wrong, though, is in the big picture. Just because there will be a gap between the demise of quality print-based reviews and the rise of quality online criticism doesn't mean the demise of print is a calamity. It just means exactly what he said: There will be a gap.

This is what happens when one industry dies and another emerges to take its place. It takes a while for the new industry to pick up all the slack left behind by the old industry. Whether you think that's a calamity or not depends on your viewpoint. I'm pragmatic, so it doesn't bother me. The gap is only temporary. I have faith the new industry will take on the old roles. I have faith.

Photo courtesy of austinevan. Creative Commons license.

How Dan Rather could have kept his job

It's been four years since the flawed "60 Minutes" report on George Bush's National Guard service and Dan Rather's subsequent ignominious separation from CBS. But the incident still holds important lessons for newspeople today. Namely: Rather and his team tripped up not because they weren't doing good journalism, but because they were using the "old world" rules in a "new world" game. And it bit them in the proverbial patootie.

In the old world, investigative reporting went something like this: Get a hint of something juicy, spend months tracking it down, all the while holding your cards close to your chest to prevent competitors from finding out what you're up to and, dang it all, scooping you on your own story. Next, get your ducks in a row, double-check your piece, and then release it to the world in one fell swoop. Make a spectacular splash, and don't forget to take a victory lap so your journalism peers can genuflect in the face of your total awesomeness.

Because let's admit it, part of what motivates journalists to do kick-butt investigative reporting is to reap kudos from their peers. Don't get me wrong. Many reporters absolutely do care about the subjects they investigate. And for some, exposing wrongdoing is, in fact, their only motivation. But for many others, part of what keeps them slogging through the long, lonely, and distinctly unglamorous days of investigative reporting are visions of the recognition they will receive down the road. And not just reporters. What editor doesn't, after all, take into account "Pulitzer potential" when deciding whether to greenlight a story that will take one (or two) of their warm bodies out of the daily grind for the indeterminate future?

But here's the problem with playing the old game in the new world: Get one thing wrong, and you'll get skewered. Maybe even lose your job.

This didn't used to be a problem. Not because investigative reporters didn't make mistakes. They almost certainly did. But the difference is that reporters enjoyed what some today might call a special advantage: They owned the printing presses. Mechanisms for bringing their errors to light in any meaningful way simply didn't exist. No public commons existed for readers to get together and start bringing collective weight to things that seemed off. Like, "Hey, that thing you said about that boat was wrong. It doesn't use the XYZ motor. It uses an ABC motor." And, "Yeah, you're right. My dad had one of those when I was a kid. I remember him complaining that he wanted the XYZ motor, but it couldn't fit." And, "Indeed, I worked in a boat shop, and our customers used to ask for the XYZ motor, and we had to tell them they couldn't get it."

With the Web, all that changes. With the Web, everyone enjoys the special advantage. Errors no longer escape scrutiny. Just the opposite. Mistakes get analyzed and magnified six ways to Sunday. In the new world, reporters simply can't get away with the things they got away with before.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that the "60 Minutes" team knowingly had doubts about the documents which cast shadows on Bush's National Guard service. They purportedly consulted with independent experts to verify the documents' authenticity. All well and good. That's standard journalistic practice. And in the old world, that was probably good enough. In the new world, however, it's not even sufficient.

The difference is in the confidence rate. Let's say the experts' assessments give you an 80% confidence rate that what you have is kosher. The experts' credentials are impeccable, and they say they are reasonably sure that the documents are legit. But they're not 100% sure. With the amount of information at their disposal, they say they can't be 100% sure, only 80%. In the old world, 80% might have been as good as you could get. There wasn't an efficient mechanism to reach 100% confidence. So 80% was good enough, and you legitimately went out the door with that.

In the new world, however, you often can get to 100%. How? By putting the material out to the world and letting the crowd respond.

At the 2006 Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism, new media thought leader Dan Gillmor suggested that "60 Minutes" could have saved itself buckets of headaches if, sometime during its investigation, it had simply posted portions of the documents online and asked for help verifying their authenticity. Given the amount of totally random, yet holding-a-piece-of-the-proverbial-elephant regular folk who weighed in after the fact (typewriter enthusiasts, a guy who was a Navy clerk in the early '70s, a former Air Force personnel specialist), it seems reasonable to believe that CBS could have determined the documents were, in fact, suspect--long before their report went on air.

So this is the point: In the old world, an 80% confidence rate was perhaps as high as you could get. You could get away with going out the door with an 80% confidence rate. In the new world, however, you often can get to 100%. We didn't have the tools before. We do now. So a journalist today has no excuse for not using the tools at their disposal to achieve that 100% confidence rate.

"But what about our scoops?!" some will protest. "If we post to the world what we're working on, we'll lose our scoops."

Hmm. I see what you're saying. Here are some thoughts:

-- It's possible that Rather and crew could have gotten the help they needed without tipping their hand. Simply post a portion of the documents and see what people say.

-- It's more likely, however, that they would had to have been more forthcoming. Online audiences only get involved when they feel invested in the person/site asking for their help. It's hard to feel curious, much less invested in something if a reporter/website only offers a blind shred of something. It's much easier to feel invested if there's a big hullaboo going on.

So yes, in leveraging the new tools to try to get to 100% confidence rate about the veracity of their stories, reporters are more likely than not going to have to tip their hands about what they're working on. This is a bad thing only if your goal is to get scoops rather than to bring the truth to light. And given that prioritizing a scoop over getting to the truth can bite you in the butt, as it did "60 Minutes," it's increasingly going to be in every reporter's interest to go for accuracy, scoops be damned.

The good news is that scoops aren't going to mean as much in the future as they did in the past. Newspaper scoops were important in two-newspaper towns. When as a reader, you're only getting your news once a day, you want to subscribe to the newspaper that's not a day behind. Online, however, all sites get everything more or less immediately. Maybe there's a lag of a few hours between when one site breaks something and others confirm it. But a few hours doesn't mean much to readers. (Most are not spending their waking hours waiting for the next big news item. They do have lives....) Scoops are not going to drive reader preferences. Much more important are going to be things like accuracy, how well the site helps the reader understand the significance of the things it covers, how engaging the writing is, and how easy the site is to use. Scoops? Pshaw.

Photo courtesy of scriptingnews. Creative Commons license

Howard Kurtz doesn't get it

Howard Kurtz's column today bemoans the recent round of Washington Post buyouts. What he gets right is that it's painful to watch talented reporters like Tom Ricks and Sue Schmidt walk out the door. But what he gets wrong is what the future is about.

Specifically, he says:

"I know, I know. The future is digital. The Web is a cornucopia of fast-moving video and blogs and bulletins and gossip, while newspapers are old, slow and less than hip."

OK, he's right about the future being digital. But he's wrong about contrasting the Web as hip and newspapers as less than hip. It's not about being hip. It's about delivering information to readers in forms they enjoy and find useful. It's not that readers don't want to learn about "Jack Abramoff's dirty dealings" (as Kurtz describes Schmidt's investigative findings) or follow the Middle East that another Washington Post departee, Robin Wright, covered for a quarter century. It's that they don't want to consume the information in the way that newspapers are dishing it out.

Why should this be so surprising? We don't wear the same clothes we did 25 years ago. Our cars have features (cup holders, CD changers) that they didn't have 25 years ago. We don't make phone calls the same way we did 25 years ago. Know anyone who's thinks a landline only is just dandy? So why should we expect that news readers would be satisfied with inverted pyramids and text only?

It's easy to look at online news and dismiss it as nothing but "gossip" and "fast-moving video." Because, sure, among online-only news sites, that's the vast majority of what's out there. Today. And that's key: today. It's like that today, but it won't always be. The reporters of tomorrow are the ones who will look at all those tools and gizmos and realize, "Hey, I could use that to report and tell my story better."

Here's an exercise: Take the Washington Post's two-year investigation of Jack Abramoff. Read the Post's Ombudsman's column about how it was done. Now, imagine how you might report that investigation today using all the digital tools available to you. Start at the beginning: Imagine how you might use blogs and crowd-sourcing to assist your investigation, long before you have anything meaningful to report. (Tip: Take a look at how Josh Marshall and TalkingPointsMemo.com did just that to uncover the US Attorneys scandal. And then consider this: He won a Polk Award for that story. Some might say that means he knows a thing or two about how to use the digital world to do important reporting.)

Then imagine how you might use "fast-moving video" or slide shows or Google mashups or mobile-phone content to create engaging reports. Just because it's "serious" doesn't mean it has to be reported in 4,000-word, text-only formats. Take a look at the Post's timeline, for crying out loud. Please don't tell me you couldn't come up with something more interactive, more engaging, something that would make people actually want to play with it. Of course you could. And their follow-the-money graphics. Very pretty. But come on people... totally static. With databases up the ying-yang these days, you could easily hook this up so that the reader could slice and dice the data in any way they chose.

The point is, when MSM folks dismiss online technologies as nothing more than the purview of gossips and dilettantes, they are missing the point: The brave new digital world is not the scourge of journalism. It is the savior. Online tools offer journalists the opportunity to do better investigative reporting and find those important stories and then to tell those stories in ways that draw readers in, rather than turning them off.

Photo courtesy of Alejandro the Great

Begging people to subscribe is not the answer

Washington Post political reporter Dan Balz laid out the unpleasant truths in a graduation speech at the Columbia J-School last week:

"I know journalists are often math averse, but I will throw out some statistics: minus 3.9; minus 5.1; minus 3.6; minus 4.4."

He continued:

"What are these numbers, you may ask? Perhaps you instinctively know. These numbers represent the percentage declines in circulation over the last six months for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune."

His solution?

"Here is your first assignment. No matter where you next land, no matter what you do, please, please subscribe immediately to a newspaper!"

Really?

It's thinking like this that continually convinces me that folks from the mainstream media are not going to be the ones to figure out the future of news. As any businessperson knows, you cannot ensure the viability of your product by begging people who are otherwise uninterested to buy it. Even worse by telling them they should buy it, that it's the morally responsible thing to do. You have to make your customers want your product.

Did Apple create a blockbuster music business by telling people, "You really should buy and listen to your music our way?" No, of course not. First, they took a look at prevailing conditions within the music industry that either weren't working for customers or could be done a lot better. Like: In order to get that one song you really liked, you had to buy a CD of 11 other songs that very well could be crap. To take your music on vacation, you had to cart around a large CD player and a bunch of CDs. To buy music, you had to physically go to a store--or buy a CD online and wait a few days for it to arrive by mail.

So why did the iPod and iTunes become instant successes? Become something customers wanted and flocked to in droves? Because it made the whole experience of buying and listening to music better. Just want that one song? Buy only it. Don't have room for all that crap? Look how small this device is. Want it now? You got it.

If mainstream newsfolks want to find the future of their business, they're going to have to stop whining about those horrible people who won't buy what they're selling and start thinking about how they can create something people actually will want.


Photo courtesy of dan taylor