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If I Had My Way |
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Wednesday, November 25, 2009 previous post <> next post One Man's Opinion - III The Blogosphere continues to feed on the trials of the newspapers with special emphasis on the hyjinks of Rupert Murdoch, Chairman and CEO of News Corporation. Danny Sullivan, from Search Engine Land, published another reaction entitled, "Thoughts On A 'Killer' Bing-News Corp Deal & The Myth Of An 'OPEC For News'": Ideally, what the AP or Murdoch want is an OPEC for news. They want to control the flow of news through the pipelines they think their news cartels control. As far as they're concerned they (and only they) have tapped into news reservoirs that exist. Obviously, Danny makes a couple of valid points with that summary -- and he goes on to debunk some other ideas that are floating around; however, he fails to offer any suggestions. The fact of the matter is that the newspapers have forgotten a very important rule. If you want money from your readers then you must serve those readers better than the competition. There was a time in Minneapolis when we had three newspapers, one morning and two evening. Unfortunately, I was not a news junky way back then; however, as a carrier, we were well aware of the wishes of various customers -- we had to collect each and every month, thus giving each customer access to a responsible individual. The customers have lost all access since then. And to make matters worse, we have had a number of technological changes including Television, the Personal Computer and the Internet. And, you know what?? The affected people don't even want to talk about it. What is that saying about head-in-sand?? It is very simple. the newspapers need to understand all the technology in order to develop a community to serve the needs and wants of a group of people willing to pay a subscription fee in order to be a member of that community. They might start by taking a hint from Doc Searls, who believes that we need some kind of tool to "empower" the customer. I have been trying to convince Doc that the "tool" is the Personal Computer and the way to "empower" the customer is give them a database (AKA: Personal Digital Multimedia ScrapBook, PDMSB -- obviously, I am a developer and I believe that I have created an ideal solution). The business about OPEC has some validity -- it is not so much having control over the flow of news as to have control over both sides of the conversation between the customer and the newspaper. These customers will be getting lots of special privileges, needing controlled communication with properly programmed servers. And, don't get excited about closed silos -- there is a big difference between silos built for service as opposed to silos built for other needs. A very important part of this new life for newspapers is a solution to the Google problem. Google, supposedly, provides links to content as opposed to the content itself. This, of course, means that present content source is unreliable since sources are coming and going all the time. The newspapers need to develop a publishing protocol together with an archival database system. All items will be "published" to the archival database with copyright reproduction under control of the author/publisher. In effect we are talking about users participating in the archival database system as part of their subscription with their local newspaper. Obviously, there is much to be discussed here. Now, if the newspapers want to do business with Microsoft, they might try and get Ballmer to switch from search to archive management -- and how about support for the database software that all the subscribers will be using?? That could be a whole new ball game. To be continued... Doug Skoglund skoglund@pdmsb.com
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