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Random Thoughts about Newspapers
I’m just rereading a piece about higher education dying just like the newspapers and I can’t help thinking that newspaper publishers need to just redefine themselves and their products and find new sources of revenue.
How do newspapers make money? Ad Sales and Readers, right? Who really cares what the medium or channel is. Expand your market base as one side constricts.
With ad sales, I’m pretty sure that the news agencies invested in technology spends to run those online digital ad networks across their sites. Start offering those services to a larger market with a better price point. Offer to sell ads for the Pennysaver like coupon papers, small publications and other publishers living on the ad spends; expand your sales for your services not your content.
You have the experience with sales, ad creation and technology to run it all. So use it for more than your own publication.
I mentioned getting revenue from services, so I’m sure lots of folks are shocked. Don’t be, I think they should continue to sell their content to readers with subscriptions. Subscriptions sold by paper, digital or mobile, sell them all just drop their price.
Did she just say “Drop Their Price”? Yes, I did. Expand your other market with content. Sell it to and for every blog etc that wants to republish it. Allow all teasers for free to entice and offer a soft baseline of information. But sell the republish rights for each item for a penny. One cent.
Will these ideas offer a big enough return to be considered by the Knight Ridders (The McClatchy Company) of the world? Maybe not, but then again I never said I had the solution just a few random thoughts…..
What do you think?
Take a Tour Through Reality
So it’s not exact science, it’s still worth viewing.
Welcome to Yahoo! U – The Web will dismember universities, just like newspapers
Students starting school this year may be part of the last generation for which “going to college” means packing up, getting a dorm room, and listening to tenured professors. Undergraduate education is on the verge of a radical reordering. Colleges, like newspapers, will be torn apart by new ways of sharing information enabled by the Internet. The business model that sustained private U.S. colleges can’t survive.
The real force for change is the market: Online classes are just cheaper to produce. Community colleges and for-profit “education” entrepreneurs are already experimenting with dorm-free, commute-free options. Distance-learning technology has just hit its stride after years of glitchy videoconferences—and will keep improving. Innovators have yet to tap the potential of the aggregator to change the way students earn a degree—much like the news business in 1999. And as major universities offer some core courses online, we’ll see a cultural shift toward acceptance of what is still, in some circles, a “Phoenix U” joke.
It is hard to predict the precise pace of change—but it’s possible that within 15 years most college credits will come from classes taken online. In 2007, nearly 4 million students took at least one online course, and the numbers are growing. Within a generation, college will be a mostly virtual experience for the average student. The Ivies will be much less affected than the mid-tier and local schools. But colleges that depend on tuition, and have no special brand, will be hit hard. The recession will accelerate this trend, as students become warier of taking on loans, and state schools experiment after fund cuts. This doesn’t just mean a different way of learning: The funding of academic research, the culture of the academy, and the institution of tenure are all threatened.
Having multiple studies for various cross functional activities and responsibilities will be the norm. The standard and near future degree programs don’t reflect this. I say less than 10 years not 15 and we will see this come to pass.
Don Tapscott: Re-Industrialize the Planet
(Thanks Gerd!)
“Re-Industrialize the Planet”. A quick summary:
* The web is creating a global infrastructure for collaboration (which leads to disruption and confusion)
* As a result, all of our institutions have come to the end of their life-cycle
* The current recession is a crucial punctuation point in human history – the point where we said that we need to reset, the point where the industrial economy has finally run out of gas
* This paradigm shift is creating a crisis of leadership
* The Digital Natives are inheriting this situation – and they think very differently
* Kids are now the authority on many issues
* We have 40 years to re-industrialize the planet
ideas
As an idea person, I’m constantly amazed at the speed of which new ones seem to be entering the main stream. If ideas use to be “a dime a dozen“, they are more like “penny for a pound” today.
From tweeting stuff your older father says to discussing the life of a squirrel, these ideas seem to be finding an audience and gaining sucess in short timeframes. Today the New York Times released an article that showcased the case of a Twitter account named “shitmydadsays”. Less than 30 days after launch, this young man has over 200,000 followers, media coverage, market appeal, an agent and multiple book offers.
So here’s to the speed of ideas and to hitting that sweet spot that only the world can tell you about.
a new way to write
lately i’ve been educated by the younger people i work with on my day job, on the way that language is changing “in the wild” (my tags for real life)
LolCats (http://icanhascheezburger.com/) was one of the first to start using it, but not the only one and twitter hit it out of the ballpark with the micro text portion
not only are these sites and adoptees changing the spelling of words, they are also changing the quantity and style of the written word
i do it
for my personal taste i forgo the limits enforced by punctuation and proper grammar
do i know them
yes, i do - i just chose to not worry about them while i am expressing my thoughts on my personal blog
so knowing that change is evident and closing in fast, i started searching and found a wonderful discovery – the guide below
http://www.140characters.com – while going through the site, i discovered the history page
<excerpt>
The original post “How Twitter Was Born” follows.
Twitter was born about three years ago, when @Jack, @Biz, @Noah, @Crystal, @Jeremy, @Adam, @TonyStubblebine, @Ev, me (@Dom), @Rabble, @RayReadyRay, @Florian, @TimRoberts, and @Blaine worked at a podcasting company called Odeo, Inc. in South Park, San Francisco. The company had just contributed a major chunk of code to Rails 1.0 and had just shipped Odeo Studio, but we were facing tremendous competition from Apple and other heavyweights. Our board was not feeling optimistic, and we were forced to reinvent ourselves.
“Rebooting” or reinventing the company started with a daylong brainstorming session where we broke up into teams to talk about our best ideas. I was lucky enough to be in @Jack’s group, where he first described a service that uses SMS to tell small groups what you are doing. We happened to be on top of the slide on the north end of South Park. It was sunny and brisk. We were eating Mexican food. His idea made us stop eating and start talking.
I remember that @Jack’s first use case was city-related: telling people that the club he’s at is happening. “I want to have a dispatch service that connects us on our phones using text.” His idea was to make it so simple that you don’t even think about what you’re doing, you just type something and send it. Typing something on your phone in those days meant you were probably messing with T9 text input, unless you were sporting a relatively rare smartphone. Even so, everyone in our group got the idea instantly and wanted it.
Later, each group presented their ideas, and a few of them were selected for prototyping. Demos ensued. @Jack’s idea rose to the top as a combination of status-type ideas. @Jack, @Biz, and @Florian were assigned to build version 0.1, managed by @Noah. The rest of the company focused on maintaining Odeo.com, so that if this new thing flopped we’d have something to fall back upon.
The first version of @Jack’s idea was entirely web-based. It was created on March 21st, 2006. My first substantive message is #38:
Read more and preorder the book - “140 Characters – A Style Guide for the Short Form”
Enjoy the Web, it’s making you feel better
The brain’s “seeking system” is hard-wired to obsessively love Google, Twitter, e-mail, and other electronic communication devices, fueled by the opioid neurotransmitter dopamine, according to neuroscientists.
Seeking. You can’t stop doing it. Sometimes it feels as if the basic drives for food, sex, and sleep have been overridden by a new need for endless nuggets of electronic information. We are so insatiably curious that we gather data even if it gets us in trouble. Google searches are becoming a cause of mistrials as jurors, after hearing testimony, ignore judges’ instructions and go look up facts for themselves. We search for information we don’t even care about. Nina Shen Rastogi confessed in Double X, “My boyfriend has threatened to break up with me if I keep whipping out my iPhone to look up random facts about celebrities when we’re out to dinner.” We reach the point that we wonder about our sanity. Virginia Heffernan in the New York Times said she became so obsessed with Twitter posts about the Henry Louis Gates Jr. arrest that she spent days “refreshing my search like a drugged monkey.”
Remember when you were a kid?
Enjoy as you recognize how you can return to when you thought everything was possible.
Take That, Toy Story! Mattel’s ‘Avatar’ Action Figures to Offer Augmented Reality
Anticipation for James Cameron’s 3-D sci-fi adventure Avatar has been at a fevered pitch for seemingly forever, and cinephiles and geeks everywhere now have less than five months to see if it lives up to the hype (it’s scheduled to open December 18, 2009). But for the Comic-Con audience, where the toys are almost as important as the movie they’re tied to, Mattel set hearts aflutter with its announcement of its line of Avatar action figures that are expected to hit store shelves in October. And, get this: The toys offer augmented reality. (The good news just keeps coming).
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