Print is not DEAD… The Publishing Model, on the other hand, is.
January 16, 2009Paul Quinn, one of our journalism students at the University of Mississippi interviewed me on the subject of the future of newspapers and print. In a nutshell, I repeated my views that print is not dead but rather it is the publishing model that is DEAD. Now is the time to innovate and to do what Greg Schumann told me yesterday, “Innovate. Do not ride it out. Do not stay the course.”
Mr. Magazine 
Samir…If Henry Ford looked to his customers for innovative ideas…and to find out what they want in his products, they’d have asked him for faster horses…innovation has to be institutionalized within an organizations’ culture…too often innovators are a nuisance to executives, who have a long legacy of doing things one way, and often those things yielded success…but that doesn’t quite work anymore…so what to do?…how do you get an organization to embrace change, and seek innovation,and celebrate innovators? There IS a way to do it…but it all has to start with desire. A company must ask itself if it has the appetite to change, to try new things, and to even fail in these efforts on occasion. Too often the answer is “no”..and they plan to “ride out the storm”..but when these storm clouds clear, at an unpredictable time in the future, the world will be a very different place…will they be prepared for it? I wonder.
Samir – some very successful examples of the kind of innovation a publisher needs:
1. Runner’s World
2. Reed Business Publishing
3. Electric Word
I publish case studies of how they make their profits in our newsletter Subscriptions Strategy. The amazing thing is that so few other publishers even try. It’s not so difficult!
Now this brings me back. I miss Ole Miss!
This is something we’re covering in our series: making online publishing pay – in a business media context.
Peter, Samir – would love more thoughts from you both in our on ongoing Q&A series.
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