Newspaper economics: online and offline

Here's an excellent article on the death of the Rocky Mountain News: <a href="http://www.johntemple.net/2009/09/lessons-from-rocky-mountai...;

The lessons mentioned in the article are easily applicable to any newspapers out there.

Newspapers need to find a new business model fast, to survive n the new competitive environment.

Experimentation is the way to go, as mentioned. It's all about trying, trying fast enough in hope to hit the jackpot.

While tablets might seem like the popular thing right now, they are just about distribution - getting content to people. That doesn't change the way how people will want to part their money.

Let me end with two quotes from Albert Einstein which I think are applicable here:

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

"The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them."

Part of the problem or part of the solution?

Newspaper owners and managers are kidding themselves if they think they can force the world back 10 years. Either get on board with new business models or face the consequences. You can't put the internet back in a box.

Perhaps the future of news is BBC type journalism, where everyone pays a news tax (called licence fee in the UK) and the government pays journalists to follow the stories. With the right indepedence from the politicians, these journalists can generate the news, and sites can take these feeds for low cost. I'm normally against government ownership of anything, but if newspapers can't be profitable enough to generate news that doesn't pay, then someone is going to have to do it.

This is by Hal Varian - he's one of those people where I'm happy to read pretty much anything he writes.