News without newspapers?
: Doc Searls comes out with on-the-spot insights that abstract and summarize big trends with the clarity a new pair of glasses brings and he does it with the ease and frequency with which Howard Stern farts.
At the Syndicate conference this week, I was standing next to Doc and a fellow media executive who was saying what all us media executives say all the time: We need to find the business models that will support quality journalism.
Without missing a beat, Doc says, “You need to come up with business models that support news without newspapers.”
Exactly. You needn’t take that as a literal prediction — though some will — to find truth and value in that. We need to look at a world in which support from classified, retail, and national advertising will leak or pour out and in which the audience goes wherever it wants to go.
We need to rethink about newsrooms as news-gathering (not just news-creating) operations that bring together the community’s news and share it wherever, however, and whenever the community wants. And, yes, we need to think of new business models to support this.
