A new study out of Northwestern University’s Media Management Center, “Running while the Earth Shakes: Creating an Innovation Strategy to Win in the Digital Age, A Study on Innovation in the News Media,” by Annette Moser-Wellman, explores the creative strategies media organizations can follow to adapt to change. Here’s a link to the PDF file.
Executive Summary
The news industry faces seismic changes as the Internet transforms the market and the competitive climate for news and information. Traditional news media organizations must aggressively adapt their business models to stay relevant in this evolving marketplace. And they must become effective and nimble innovators – able to rapidly and continually develop new products, services, distribution mechanisms, business models, strategies and revenue streams in response to or in anticipation of changes in the competitive landscape, consumer preference and technologies. And non-traditional or “emerging” news companies — those that have entered the world of gathering, producing and distributing news and information since the dawn of the World Wide Web — need to be on guard so they don’t lose their natural innovative abilities as they grow. So this report is designed to help both new and old media companies identify and aggressively redefine business models, create dynamic processes, develop flexible organizations and inspire vital leadership to navigate industry changes ahead.
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Nothing about journalism in this model, I note. All that stuff about comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable is well out the window by now. It’s all about business models. Hopefully, the failure of mainstream media will lead to their further decline while there will be a rise of more responsive media who dare to tell stories that corporate media censor or overlook. Let journalist be journalists. Down with the MBAs!!!
With all due respect to Jonathan Miller, it’s vitally important that there be business models that will SUPPORT journalism. The news-gathering and analyzing engine that is journalism is expensive to support; we cannot assume that just because we as journalists want to produce journalism that there will be a way to pay for it. The old mass-market model that made robust, investigative journalism possible is waning; if we don’t come up with new business models, we’ll all be in trouble. That’s why the Media Management Center is trying to help news businesses succeed in the new business climate. That’s why we commissioned the research and published the report. Journalism is what we’re trying to preserve. We’re trying to help companies that produce news find ways to pay for it — and that is going to require a different kind of leadership and management that is usual in the news industry.
Business models that support journalism or prevent it?