Newspaper Next Workshop Tries to Keep Newspapers Alive

On Friday, February 9, I attended the “Newspaper Next” workshop at UC Berkeley. The workshop is a training offered by the American Press Institute (API) aimed at publishers, news executives, editors and ad managers. The training discussed the eroding of the newspaper market and provided a framework for using innovation to change this trend.

The most interesting aspect of the workshop was the discussion of disruptive innovations which is based on Clayton Christensen’s book “The Innovator’s Solution”. The concept is that new disruptive innovations address needs and problems of markets not served by the traditional business, in this case newspapers. They capture this market with solutions that are good enough but don’t require tremendous capital outlay. Over time they continue to further innovate and grow in market size until they start taking away the existing customers of the traditional business. By then the traditional business is in trouble and on the decline, eventually fading away. DEC computers was given as an example. They were the provider of business mini mainframe computers in the 80’s and the PC came along for personal use and eventually took over business computing forcing DEC out of business.

A key point of the workshop was what can traditional newspaper publishing businesses do to compete with the disruptive innovations occurring online? The recommendation was to create there own disruptive innovations that target new markets they have not served in the past. The second half of the day focused on methods for developing innovative ideas and a process for pursuing promising opportunities.

So the morning was all about showing how Christensen’s book predicts that newspaper businesses are going to fade away, overtaken by new disruptive innovations such as Yahoo News, YouTube, RSS newsfeeds and MySpace. And the afternoon was a sales pitch for onsite training at $11K to help the newspapers attending learn and implement the API’s N2 program so they can stay alive.

My guess is that a few of the newspaper publishers that attend these workshops around the country will adopt the ideas and come up with some innovative ways to stay viable. But most will get mired in internal resistance to change and will decline, while disruptive innovations become the dominant sources of information.