Just got here. IIRC, Christiansen also wrote The Innovator’s Dilemma.

So in 1990, living directly across the street in Roslyn, VA and having as my Trival Pursuits partner the Financial Editor of USAToday, I got priviledged access to high-level Gannet management. At that time, they were a successful national paper with regionally printed editions, trying to go local.

My 2-hour presentation was about the dramatic changes the network effect – (it wasn’t called the Intenet yet) – would wreck on the news business; eg, total devastation of classified ad revenue. I explained that as the network became ubiquitous and its speed inexorably increased, so would its reach and information currency (value) in full-motion color, an exact copy of which would cost virtually nothing. Bad for the print format – margin squeeze with no competitive response possible, etc.

I proposed my company to outfit them to own what would become craigslist, rent.com and eBay et al. My Mac demo showed how it would work for someone moving from WDC to Boulder, CO – needing a mover to get there; to rent an apartment or buy a house BEFORE they got there; hotel/motel reservations for the interim stay; scheduled telephone-electric-gas-garbage service hook-ups, etc. Integrated email from USAtoday and lashed-up 800-voice mail for their classified advertisers (sorry, this apt is already rented), etc, etc. Even credit/debit transaction processing.

They didn’t believe the ecommerce potential illustrated on the final slide; which as it turns out, I had sorely understated by at least 10MM-fold….and besides digital classifieds wasn’t their mission. Oh well, hindsight.

So NYT will probably survive longer than many other papers…but even here, age matters, and I doubt that many people who have grown up with the Internet..say, those now under 25 or so..will ever take the paper as seriously as their elders.

WSJ is indeed the key data point and the answer—a publication has to provide value people are willing to pay for, and get it to them at a cost less than teh revenue stream. WSJ appears to be doing that at teh national or international scale, as, at the other end of the spectrum, are many suburban weeklies that focus on local news not available elsewhere, and local advertising.

The problem is in the middle–city and metro papers which offer very little news value and now can’t compete for ad revenues, either. It’s not clear that there IS an answer for many of them, but if not, boo hoo—not the first time an industry or business model was made obsolete by technological and/or societal change.

A couple of years later, the Times ended their OC edition. It became a “Section” then disappeared altogether.

Unfortunately, the Register, which has been good on local stories, started using the NY Times service for national and international stories and that did not go well with the readers. Then Craigslist and the local online classifieds arrived.

But that’s a telling indication that people who’d been paying for the paper for the news left them a long time previously.

I know I did.

Current research shows that 96% of buggy whip users have never driven a buggy.

The core value of traditional newspapers was their print production and distribution infrastructure. It took a lot people and equipment to print up hundreds of thousands of copies of newspapers every day and distribute those all over a region. Newspapers were the only means of disseminating large amounts of dense information (imagine the cost and tedium of reading hundreds of classified ads over TV or radio by comparison). The internet rendered that valuable infrastructure obsolete.

I suspect the dogleg was created by the feedback loop of more and more people getting their information online which drove more people to get their information online and so on until it suddenly snowballed over a period of few months.

However, I don’t think we can entirely dismiss the widespread bias in the media. With the rise of the internet, people began to see what the media left out. The Parliament of Clocks effect failed and the media fell off the pedestal it had created for itself.

I also suspect that most newspapers simply don’t deliver much valuable information. How useful to anyone is the political reporting of the NYTimes? When was the last time they broke a big story first? As Jon Stewart pointed out, it was “two kids from High School Musical 3 with their grandmother’s Chinchilla coat” that broke the Acorn story, not the Times or another media giant. They really don’t provide useful information and that is why their attempts to charge for online content have failed. I mean, how much will you pay to see a story that is largely politicians trading barbs at each other’s expense?

The Wall Street journal prospers behind a paywall because it does produce unique and very detailed business information and that business people will pay good money to read. The information is detailed and dense meaning that excerpts on blogs and other places don’t really capture all the important elements of the stories.

Hmmm. Have you read anything by Ronald Coase? His thought experiments are far more effective — and far more falsifiable — than most of the number-crunching exercises that serve to obscure economics.

Now, ownership is measured in minutes and that is under the physical production and distribution cycle for print media.

As to your specific question, wasn’t there a big scandal about phoney circulation numbers about then? It was analogous to the pumped up oil reserve valuations that some oil companies published.