lectroid.net

In the Pixar movie The Incredibles, the bad guy, Syndrome, explains his grand plan to Mr. Incredible, “…I’ll sell my inventions so anyone can be a super hero, and when everyone is super,” he adds menacingly, “no one will be.”

I think Syndrome is now working for the newspaper industry.

Ink and paper are commodities, news is a commodity, Journalism is not. This is why newspapers work as businesses. Once upon a time, all a newspaper needed to shine was great writing and that was about it. Later some papers figured out that decent photography and some effort at page design would be good too, but the hallmark has always been the writing. Content, as was said, was king.

Today, however, there is this other (should I still say, “new”?) medium that newspapers are dabbling in called “the web” and it brings some other aspects to the table that no one had to consider before, things like functionality and usefulness.

Functionality and usability are most certainly not commodities.

The problem is most newspapers are still approaching the web like, well, newspapers. They look at their website’s functionality as a commodity and much like ink or newsprint they assume they can just write a check and the problem is solved.

This is evidenced by a plethora of vendors with something to offer a newspaper. You can write a check and get comments on your site. You can write a check and get your stuff magically dropped onto maps. You can write a check and get your stuff crammed into mobile phones. You can even write a check to get news on your site (er, what business were you in again?) and bizarrely you can even write a check to have someone else write your stories for you. With all this check writing, who needs innovation?

But here’s the thing, if you can write that check so can I. Ok, maybe not me personally as oftentimes those checks aren’t small, but my company can or conversely, my company’s competitor can. So in other words, “when everyone is super… no one will be.”

I get where this strategy sounds good. See, if all that hard-to-understand “techie” stuff (the stuff that actually makes up the functionality and usefulness of a website) is nothing more than commodity then newspaper survival must all boil down, once again, to content being king — and that must be a very comforting thought to those who wish the Internet was never invented. It’s the “do what you do best and link to the rest,” approach taken to a perverted extreme.

It’s also suicide.

Look at what the iPhone has done to the mobile industry. Or, closer to home, look at what Craig Newmark did to newspaper classifieds. What will happen when someone simply makes a better news product and introduces it into what is becoming a homogenized online news space?

Or the real question: why wait to find out?