Reinventing the Newspaper
โIf you want to know why newspapers are in such trouble, the most salient fact is this: Printing presses are terrifically expensive to set up and to run. This bit of economics, normal since Gutenberg, limits competition while creating positive returns to scale for the press owner, a happy pair of economic effects that feed on each other.โ
โWith the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves โ the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public โ has stopped being a problem.โ
โRound and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know โIf the old model is broken, what will work in its place?โ To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.โ
Perhaps it is not the newspaper model, per se, that needs replaced. Perhaps it is the components of that model that need innovation: printing, distribution, and journalism. Letโs examine how.