The Johnston Press - I did not have to be this way | SMLXL - Business and Communication Innovation from Alan Moore

The Johnston Press – it did not have to be this way

December 15th, 2008

The lack of an effective digital strategy, few apparent plans aside from further cost cuts, and concerns over refinancing debt are the main reasons cited for the share price collapse.

Writes the Sunday Herald

And of course the banking collapse and its knock-on effect are well documented as stalling the economy, and advertising the bedrock of Newspaper revenues get hammered.

CEO Tim Bowdler commented that the extent of the fall in share price was “disappointing” but “if you look at our peer group it is not dissimilar”.

But I argue it still did not have to be that way.

I agree with the statement that there was a lack of an effective digital strategy, because there was a complete lack of knowledge and comprehension of the economics of living in a pull economy, defined by search, proximity, relevance, contextualisation, metadata, pointing, linking, trust and recommendation. what type of advertsing inventory comes out of that?

The search economy is defined bu the quality of information. The Johnston press misunderstood, community and what life is local really meant in the super-connected age. They sold digital inventory as one sell dead-wood inventory. Leaving them over exposed when times got tough.

Its not that journalism, news and newspapers are redundant in this time of epochal change, but the people that run them are. Because they have failed to truly experiement, they have failed to ask themselves what is advertising in the 21st Century?

If the mobile and the Internet were conceived, designed and constructed as bi-directional communication platforms, why are we in broadcast mode? How do we we use these low cost tools and capabilities to drive our business? Its the same for the music industry – rather than asking why 57 million people where file sharing – they focused on shutting the thing down. why are we using the furniture of advertising that was essentially created 500 years ago in a bi-directional, networked society and economy. C’mon do you think Gutenberg would still be slaving over a wooden printing press and hand stitching bibles. No he’d be blogging, and vlogging, and moblogging.

But Pandora was out of the box – the little minx, she wielded the stick of creative destruction with great aplomb.

Back to Tim Bowdler, though to be fair the board of JP must take full responsibility, he said – “if you look at our peer group it is not dissimilar”.

and that’s right because they all think in the same way. They could have experimented, brought in new metrics, road-tested stuff in the real world – limited exposure, but with great learning. Quick rapid iterations.

Sticking in a chair at a Journo school aint gonna quite crack it in my humble view.

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