My Guardian column this week used the Economist’s Project Red Stripe to look at the need for and means of innovation in the news business (nonregistration version here). Snippet:
We need new and innovative journalistic products and companies with sustainable (read profitable) business models. We need to pay for journalism.
This means that journalists need to take responsibility for their economic fate. But that’s not the way most of us were brought up in the trade. I was instructed to stay far away from business – and the people who did it. But, of course, with the internet, that has changed. Now the news industry is desperate for new products and new business models. But journalists often do not have the knowledge of business required to build sustainable enterprises. Indeed, their culture is famously resistant to change and to business.
So I wonder whether and how innovation can spring from within.
