12:04 | Fred Barbash-Moderator - I think Rosabeth Moss Kanter of the Harvard Business School made a similar point on Arena Jen:
Here we are blathering on Politico.com about the future of news? How truly ironic
While advertising-supported, environment-unfriendly news papers shrink, the Internet keeps opinion and information flowing freely, making our democracy noisier than ever and thus more robust. The press is no longer the printing press. Reporting the news is being unbundled from publishing it, and new models are developing at both ends of the spectrum: expert journalists becoming content providers (e.g., check out GlobalPost, my friend Charlie Sennott’s new foreign correspondent service) and anyone with a video camera or a cell phone providing content to the New York Times – and their Twitter buddies.
Sure, a for-profit newspaper that wants to convert itself into a non-profit should be able to do so under laws governing non-profits, but that won’t solve the newspaper problem, unless they offer so much value that people will make voluntary charitable contributions to make up for losses – even non-profits can’t run with constant deficits. If they create that much value compared to other media, they would not have the viability problem. So one way or another, newspapers need new strategic models, regardless of their financial structures.
|
