Today’s NYT has a good piece on new models that are evolving from the cutbacks at newspapers. Today’s focus: investigative journalism.
Tells the story of how the cuts at local newspapers led indirectly to the formation of VoiceofSanDiego.org, a great not for profit news organization focused on hard hitting investigative pieces.
It is too bad that the local newspaper couldn’t create a new model and benefit directly from it. Newspapers do have the opportunity to use new models to extend their coverage to their readers’ benefit, reduce their costs and accumulate salable ad inventory.
Obviously, with our focus, we’re talking about a few things:
* solutions applicable to all sections of the paper (news, sports, arts, business etc…), like
* deep integration with and aggregation of all content providers in the local market; to
* leverage their brand and salesforce to drive traffic and revenue to those content providers, thereby creating new inventory; and
* build for new and evolving technologies and platforms like mobile and less for print.
All of which should lead to a more defensible and relevant position in the market.
So, to be clear, we know there are some forward-thinking companies charging down the path to new solutions. Heck, we’re working with some of them. Stay tuned for some updates on that front.
It’s heartening to see new ideas evolve out of the cuts, but I still think newspapers can be more aggressive about being the change they need to become.
