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'Traditional news media are not yet willing to adopt the principals of the environment in which they find themselves.'
The news industry is a resilient bunch. Newspapers, in particular, represent some of the United States's oldest and most respected companies. So far they have weathered storms of significant social, economic and technological change by figuring out how to transform themselves and what they produce. The creation of the telegraph, for example, had doomsayers frothing, but instead newspapers turned a disruptive technology into a tool for better reporting.
During periods of massive change, the death of the newspaper has always been greatly exaggerated. So given the industry's survival skills, why worry now? One reason might be that the burst of the dot-corn bubble during the late '90's made many think they had overestimated the impact of the Internet. But in retrospect, the news media might have completely underestimated the influence of this new medium.
A Recipe for Radical Change
The Internet is a unique phenomenon that has delivered not just technological innovations but become a conduit for change, accelerating the rate, diversity and circulation of ideas. It affects nearly everything from culture to competition. It has also altered the economics of media in two important ways. First, it enables nearly limitless distribution of content for little or no cost. second, it has potentially put everyone on the planet into the media business, including the sources, businesses, governments and communities newspapers cover.
Add other ingredients-easy-to-use, open-source publishing tools, a generation who finds it more natural to instant message someone than to call, a greater demand for niche information, and a rapidly growing shift of advertising dollars to online media-and you have a recipe for radical change in the news media landscape.
Likewise, the list of online competitors is seemingly ever expanding. Search giants, such as Yahoo!, MSN and Google, continue their expansion and encroachment into the news business, siphoning ad dollars and eyeballs from traditional media Web sites. Craigslist, Monster, eBay and countless others have taken a more direct bite out of newspaper's bread-and-butter, classifieds.
But the greater threat to the longevity of established news media might not be a future that's already arrived-it might be their inability to do anything about it. Bureaucratic inertia,...