Feb. 26, 2001
Vol. 12, No. 5*

HISTORY SHOWS A RETICENCE TO RUSH TO EMBRACE THE NEW

Executives who now downplay convergence need only look back

Skepticism is the stock-in-trade of the newspaper business. While it probably should be more the province of the newsroom than anywhere else, it seems to pervade the entire operation.

I have encountered far too many advertising salespeople – an occupation whose practitioners should be inherently confident – who can tell you that they know businesses don't want to advertise with the newspaper because those businesses don't call asking to advertise.

Recent technological history in the newspaper business has been highlighted by publishers who debunked various changes as fads:

  • Thirty years ago I was told by fellows with some gray in their beards that when they were youngsters in the business, skeptics said that this newfangled offset lithography thing would never fly.

  • Around that time, I was reliably informed cold type was a passing fancy.

  • Shortly thereafter, an editor or two said rather publicly that they would never work on a computer terminal.

  • More than one publishing executive remarked to me in the early 1980s that personal computers had no place in a newspaper.

  • At a presentation I made in 1988, publishers and technologists spent about 45 minutes excoriating me for suggesting that four-color images could be digitized, separated and output on desktop computers.

  • The Internet, far too many publishers said in the mid-1990s, was like citizens band radio – a flash in the pan.

    And today, it appears that if you talk to publishers in positive terms about convergence – the melding of business and journalistic practices among television (broadcast or cable), radio, on-line and newspapers – you are treated pretty much as though you were Galileo and they were Catholic theologians in the 1600s.

    My newspaper – the Earth, they seem to be saying – is the center of the universe, and the other celestial bodies – the rest of the media, apparently – revolve around it. There is only one little flaw in this theory: That is not how our customers think of us. Advertisers and readers see newspapers as but one link in a large information chain.

    The term "media plan" is familiar in advertising – it denotes the mix of media that advertisers use to distribute their message. But readers have a "media plan," too – they go to specific media for specific needs. If the information chain drags the customer from one link to the next, increasing the number of customers for them all, what is wrong with that?

    The anti-convergence crowd seems to have four main questions:

  • Why should we share our hard-earned intellectual property with those TV guys? (Because they nicely say to their millions of viewers, "And for more on that story, read tomorrow's Daily Blatt," promotional words for which you would normally pay an awful lot of money.)

  • How are we ever going to get our editorial employees to do the extra work of appearing on camera or making motion video? (To harken back to the bad old days again, remember when we asked how were we ever going to get our editorial employees to do the extra work of making up pages in a pagination environment?)

  • Won't excellent writers and reporters who may not be handsome enough for TV get left behind? (The handsome people are anchors and regular TV reporters; take a look at the "talking head" experts used on TV and tell me they are all "handsome.")

  • Won't convergence dilute the now-independent voices of the converging media? (Perhaps, but the proliferation of voices is exploding, and even if every one of the 1400 daily newspapers in the United States entered into a convergence agreement, there would still be way more voices than there were 15 years ago.)

    The skeptics call convergence an "experiment" and watch Florida – where Tribune Co., Media General and the New York Times Co. all have convergence projects – with a wary eye.

    But convergence is not an experiment; it is the future of the news business, and it's time to prepare for it.

    -- David M. Cole, e-mail: dmc@newsinc.net

    Inside ...

    *The print version of the newsletter had the volume number as 4, when in fact it should be 5.

    From NEWSINC., Feb. 26, 2001, Copyright © 2001, The Cole Group. All Rights Reserved.

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