And We Wonder Why Print is Dying

Okay, admittedly I may be more tech savvy than most. I run a marketing podcast, so that automatically gives me a bit more knowledge of online community building and the impact of digital media. But The BeanCast aside, if I was in a dying medium, like print, I would hope I'd have a bit more drive to understand my digital future than what I'm seeing below.

Here are a few samples of technology-related headlines I saw just this morning:

From DM News:
Newspapers look to digital as print faces challenges

Another from The New York Times:
When Stars Twitter, a Ghost May Be Lurking

From the Washington Post:
In Hollywood, Reshaping a Business Model That Emerged With the Talkies

Is the fact that Newspapers are looking to digital as a solution really news? Is the fact that (Lord forbid!) celebrities aren't doing their own tweeting an insight worthy of a story? And hasn't the fact that Hollywood needs to cope with a digital future already been discussed to death?

I could go on and on!

Instead of debating the business model and practical applications of Twitter, we get the Today show telling us what a "Tweet" is. It's as if the mainstream media is so far behind the curve that they can't even enter the conversation in a meaningful way.

Is The Internet The Bad Guy?

And there's the rub. We hear all about how expensive print is and how it's dying because the business model is not viable in the face of a digital future. Or, we hear (as is directly quoted from the post article above) that "...the rise of legal and illegal downloading [sic] has already decimated the music business..."; Or yet again, we hear about how broadcast is struggling against the DVR and competition from digital spaces. Yet I would posit that the rise of digital, or even the costs of print, are not in and of themselves the reasons behind any of these dramatic shifts. The real nail in the coffin is the complete ignorance -- dare I say, intentional denial -- of the role digital will play in the future by the mainstream media at large.

Print is not just dying because people are moving online. Print is dying because it's content is rapidly becoming irrelevant. And who wants to read content that isn't relevant?

Mass Ignorance

When I see headlines likes those above, it screams to me that traditional journalists just don't get technology. I know they are speaking to the lowest common denominator of their audience. (The old fourth-grade education rule.) And I know it's not true of all journalists, nor a representative sample of the organization as a whole. But headlines like these are still revealing of how little traditional news outlets understand the digital world facing them. They reveal how ill-equipped the people running news-gathering organizations are at navigating these waters. And they reveal that there is no plan for the future, because they don't clearly see the issues beyond the immediate threats.

Don't believe me? Let's watch how these online-only plays work out. Remember, all of the above headlines were culled from the Internet. Do you see any understanding or relevance there? Do you see a vision for how these online plays are going to work?

Ongoing Lack of Vision

And please understand me. News is about the news, and these news gathering operations (whether print or online) usually do a very good job at getting that news to us. They still provide needed and relevant content. But they jeopardize their ability to deliver that content by not fully understanding the threats to their core business.

Digital was never the threat. Digital was the savior. It offered fantastic and profitably new models for delivering the news. And instead of exploring those models, newspapers ignored it. Instead of creating radically different symbiotic operations where digital fed print and print fed digital, they allowed the paper portion of the business to die. So now we are left with anemic web offerings, many of which are doomed to fail due to a lack of vision.

I realize a lot of this is pretty harsh and it's intentionally that way, mostly because I don't think it needed to happen like this. A solution could have been figured out. Whether a shift in content strategies, a shift in profitability models, maybe even a shift in delivery models, something could have been done. But instead there was too much clinging to old-school ways. And now the results of such lack of foresight are plain to see.