…Even when established media companies attempt to innovate into a new media space, they end up hedging—not throwing enough energy into new media because they’re too invested in the legacy media. Hedging isn’t stupid. It makes sense to hedge as long as your legacy product remains profitable. But hedge too long and you miss making a profitable and timely transition to the new media form…
The headline of this article is more provocative that the article itself, but it does prompt some interesting thoughts.
No, simply changing technology from ink on paper to e-ink on screen will not by itself save magazines and newspapers. That’s because ink on paper is not the core problem for magazines and newspapers. The problem is that what they are putting on paper with ink is not an attractive enough product or service anymore. We can debate why that is, if you want, what has changed when newspapers and magazines largely have not (think “lifestyle”). But the point is that simply offering the same content through a different medium doesn’t gain much. Perhaps you pick up some geek readers, for a while. Perhaps the device mitigates a few of the weaknesses of time-delayed, non-interactive publishing. Yet ultimately all the things that fail to attract an audience to the particular style of content we currently identify with newspapers and magazine reading are still there and still unattractive.
However, what may indeed offer some hope of salvation for newspapers and magazines is the emergence of e-reader technology at the same time that publishers are being forced out of their existing content businesses. They are currently willing more than ever before to adopt completely new approaches, to innovate in directions not tied to their previous practices, simply because they have to. For instance, we’re seeing print newspapers go totally online rather than go totally out of business.
So perhaps now we’ll see publishers develop new content models for the somewhat familiar e-reader channel, rather than just try to migrate their existing failing models. This could be the best chance for real innovation in paged presentation that we’ve seen in generations – assuming e-readers do in fact make it through the hype cycle, past the peak of inflated expectations and the trough of disillusionment up the slope of enlightenment to the plateau of productivity.