Opportunopoly

Online media opportunities abound if publishers are but willing to look beyond their traditional definitions. Opportunopoly examines emerging technology and market game-changers, thought leaders and, well, opportunities that may lie beyond the usual newspaper comfort zone.

I'm sure you're all tired of reading your own Obit. Here are just a couple that came to my attention recently:

DigiDayDaily.com: The Day of the Newspaper is Over

AlwaysOn: "AO Exclusive: Newspapers Are Dying"

Note that the second "exclusive" touts Arianna Huffington as the savior of journalism, but maybe only because she's on the dais at the parent's OnHollywood conference. This, while HuffPo needed $25 million in C-round venture funding just to remain viable. 

Having worked for more than a decade to get newspapers moving on interactive media, I'm inclined to think newspapers almost needed a crisis to get them off the dime with digital. While some, like SDNN, may be using the newspaper's own digital DNA against it, I wouldn't count newspapers themselves out at all. Beware the fox when he's cornered. One other thing strikes me in the great drumbeat to write newspapers' obituary. Does anyone recall the body count for DotComs in 2000? No? Convenient.

In 2000, there were 1,480 daily newspapers in the U.S. As of September, 2008, there were 1,422. Given the recent turmoil in -- stating the obvious -- TWO-newspaper towns, as of today, let’s round that down to 1,420.

So, in the same period, how many dotcoms bit the dust? We don't even have to dip into the DeadPool or FuckedCompany.com -- oops, wait, THAT's gone too -- to get an easy answer. According to Wikipedia, at least 210 DotComs closed in just 2000 alone (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble).

But wasn't 2000 a kind of perfect storm for DotComs? Maybe. But where "traditional media" is concerned, so's this. I asked Christian Hendricks, VP of McClatchy Interactive, about that company's recent layoffs and he called them "strategic." No one feels good about them, mind you, but if you can, as the first author reports, put out a digital edition at a fraction of the cost, that's going to take a fraction of the people too in a conversion to digital. McClatchy didn't lay off a single digital or sales job, Hendricks says.

Without casting any aspersions towards anyone's motives here in the newspaper dirge bandwagon, I enjoyed this piece in the Miami Herald online: "Newspapers' loudest doomsayers have their own motives." Note that the author of this piece is president of Parade Publications and a co-founder of the Newspaper Project (http://www.newspaperproject.org), so maybe we all have a bone to pick in this debate. I just don't think it's time to pick the bones of the newspaper industry just yet.

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