The Newspaper Next reports were just touted to me by the API’s director of “targeted solutions,” Elaine Clisham, whom the institute’s Web site describes as a “speaker and evangelist for Newspaper Next.” Clisham disarmingly warned me they were “very Harvard and academic and boring”—the Harvard part being a reference to Clayton Christensen, a professor at that university’s business school whose consulting firm was hired by the API to do the research. But she also said they were full of “good stuff on how newspapers got to be where they are and what to do about it.”
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“My job,” she told me, “is to make sure whatever money is out there to get, we’re in a position to be able to get it.”
“Sometimes ‘good enough’ can be great,” says “Blueprint for Transformation.” “The essence of disruption is about making tradeoffs. . . . Free newspapers are a good example. The Boston Metro“—a free commuter daily—”cannot compete with the depth and breadth of the Boston Globe. When a reader has a solid chunk of time and wants to dig into the day’s events, the Metro is an inferior product. But when that same customer wants to kill 15 minutes on a train, and the only alternative is boredom, the Metro is a near-perfect solution.”
And decades later, why would the Tribune or Sun-Times—or Reader—get worked up about the infant Craigslist, which had no discernible revenue stream at all when Craig Newmark started it in San Francisco in 1995?
Gilbert’s expected at the Reader Thursday, to meet the staff and kick the tires, along with Clisham and James O’Shea, the former managing editor of the Tribune and editor of the Los Angeles Times, who’s joining the new Creative Loafing board. O’Shea, who stopped by the office on Monday, will have the responsibility of overseeing the editorial future of the six properties. “He’s forgotten more than I’ll ever know about content,” Clisham told me.
A few pages later the same report warns that what “looks like a perfect storm for newspapers” isn’t, because “storms pass, and this one probably won’t.” It tells newspaper companies to forget they’re newspaper companies because they need to become “a new kind of local information and connection utility” that seizes the “big new opportunity” of the Internet to make themselves “everyone’s first choice to ‘help me know or do whatever it takes to live here.’”
