Jeff Jarvis posted a pretty biting rant against the newspaper owners in the Huffington Post entitled “You Blew It.” Clearly it was sparked by the the angry and often self-righteous-to-the-point-of-ridiculous tirades of newspaper executives this week at the Newspaper Association of America’s meeting (which included, almost unfathomably, coordinated attacks on Google News for aggregating links to newspaper sites).
Jarvis’ post can be best classified as a “J’accuse!” essay in which he shakes his head at the inability of newspaper execs to grasp a positive business model on the Internet after two DECADES of opportunity. And, of course, he’s right. But here’s the part that made me gulp (as a fan of reading my morning papers):
So what can you do? Two years, even a year ago, I would have said that you had time to build the networks and frameworks and platforms that would support the ecosystem of news that will come next. I would have said you could retrain your staff to take on new responsibilities: organizing and supporting that ecosystem, curating the best, training people to be the best. I would have advised you to offer your staff members the opportunity to join that ecosystem, setting them up in business. I would have told you to take advantage of the efficiencies the web allows (do what you do best, link to the rest, I used to say). I would have argued that we need to invent new forms of marketing help for an entire new population of businesses-formerly-known-as-advertisers. I did say that. But the financial crisis only accelerated your fall. It didn’t cause the fall, it accelerated it. So now, for many of you, there isn’t time. It’s simply too late.
Is he right?
