What do you get when you cross a newspaper with th...

What do you get when you cross a newspaper with the Internet?

Of course... whenever you ask a question like that... it becomes an issue of "it depends." Simply put... there's nothing that you can hang on to which will allow you to concretely develop a hard-and-fast answer.

One of the major factors is the stodginess of the newspaper business. Newspapers have the theory, "we've been doing it this way for the last XXX years. Why should we change?" Which, is potentially their death knell. Content cannot be expensive anymore. The days of multimillionaire musicians and rich writers are coming to a close. Why? Because people don't value most content. They have reasons of their own. They might say:

• "I could do that just as well as they could."


• "That's not done as well as it could be done."

And it all ends in, "so, I'm not going to pay that much!" That leads to things being developed to buck the intellectual property (IP) status quo.

EXAMPLE: The Recording Industry

Napster was not the first "find music and listen to it at no cost to you" service. It won't be the last. iTunes has made a significant impact on the damage that has done to the traditional business model that the recording industry has utilized. However, iTunes is just the beginning. Right now, we have a temporary solution, a stop-gap measure. iTunes allows the current IP monopoly on music to continue. Who holds that monopoly? The record companies.


Specifically: The "big three." Currently, they tell us what the "big music trends" are. They were the ones that decided that garage bands were "it" and that is what we got. The White Stripes, Jet and their kin came to the forefront. Active searches were developed around the concept of finding "garage bands with talent" (forgive me if that seems like an oxymoron to some of you). Honestly, it's nuts. Why should the record companies decide what you want to listen to? Artists should have free reign to say "our music is like these guys..." and that is how you expand your horizons to find new music.

But I digress...
The music industry is ripe for change. Artists that are used to being paid by record companies for their potential, will soon realize that model doesn't work anymore. Instead, they will be paid by promoters for their performance potential. Concerts and live performances are THE way to make money (the Rolling Stones, Jimmy Buffet and U2 already know this).

Back to "publishing"

The simple fact is that the Internet is erroding the very base of readership that the newspaper used to maintain.

There are many advantages to Internet news sources:

• They are current. Stories, as they change, are updated with the most recent information. Examples of this benefit can be seen with the recent West Virginia coal mine fire that occurred. Hundreds of newspapers incorrectly ran the story that virtually all of the miners had survived. Internet sites had it right after they had it wrong for about two hours. Newspapers had it wrong for an entire day.
  
• Unprecedented community interaction can occur that will both motivate the masses and drive the elevation of truth and knowledge.
  
• Flexibility of the channel: you can provide text, video, audio... all interactively... you name it.

Of course, there are also disadvantages to Internet news sources:

• A stigma to overcome of being "unreliable," "scuttlebutt," or "water cooler fodder"
• A technology barrier to overcome for the lower class and computer illiterate
  
• A unification of technology (convergence?) that needs to occur so that you don't have to know what you're using (HTML/RSS/PODCASTS) and can just "see the news" in various formats with cute/average-person-accessible names