Hmm. The venerable and respected InfoWorld's killing off its print edition. Other newspapers and magazines are doing the same, or just dying outright. Meanwhile, though, The Boston Globe has begun marketing its online edition as an add-on to its print edition, increasing online subscriptions by 145 percent, according to the folks at MarketingSherpa. And there are multiple, spirited debates taking place across the Web and the blogosphere, about what is likely to and should or should not happen to print newspapers and magazines. (Some of the most lively discussion has followed some opining from columnist David Lazarus at SFGate, the Web site of the San Francisco Chronicle, another newspaper reportedly in trouble.)
In any case, maybe someone can explain to me why print publication owners have waited this long to do anything serious about the challenges to their "empires." Instead of or in addition to gutting editorial departments and relying more and more on packaged story sets provided by "others," why haven't they recruited frequent opinion contributors as bloggers or columnists, and sought sponsors for these? Why haven't they started working with journalism and business schools to change how graduates are trained, so they don't enter a not-so-brave new world with a bunch of old-world skills and attitudes about how things work in their world? And why, oh why, are they still bothering with legal wrangling about who has the rights to link to what, when they could just, for example, make their archives completely "open source," and therefore far more attractive and useful to readers, researchers, students, and others?
These are not new ideas, and I am not the first or the only person to consider them. In my darker moments, I fear that the reason they aren't yet being seriously considered by larger numbers of those involved is the same reason why the recorded music and movie industry is still so largely flummoxed by new technologies -- apparently intractable mental inertia, or the inability or unwillingness to face and embrace change. Not to put too fine a point on it, but sometimes, evolution means waiting for a critical mass of dinosaurs to die or otherwise get out of the way...
