In a session at Columbia Business School’s recent BRITE Conference, Luke Williams from Frog Design suggested innovation comes from taking people’s preconceptions and turning them on their head.
As part of the session attendees were split into groups to brainstorm ways to “save The New York Times“. One of the suggestions was as follows:
Observation: Readership generates revenue.
Provocation: The paper has no readers.
Ideas: “Lease out the paper’s writers and content creators to other corporations.”
Here’s my question: Is that such a crazy idea?
Traditional media outlets like the NYT are skilled at creating compelling content, telling stories and crafting arguments – it’s what they do. And while newspaper revenues are falling, these are the very same skills that content-savvy businesses need – and increasingly – will happily pay well for.
The problems faced by traditional media are not due to a lack of talent but rather a question of format and business model.
Short of renting out their reporters, editors and content creators to the highest bidder, traditional media organisations could build powerhouse custom content divisions – leveraging the strength of their editorial teams (and brands) to create compelling content for business.
As an alternative, they could utilise their strengths to develop niche content development units to feed news and editorial directly to business to, in turn, repurpose in their websites, blogs and customer magazines.
This may all be happening by the back door anyway. Skilled journalists and editors are being made redundant from traditional media outlets and a new wave of would-be journalists are struggling to get their foot in the door. If these professionals cannot find well paid, secure employment in print media they will no doubt turn to online media, business and custom content providers as alternatives.
The ideas generated in the BRITE session may have been more mental exercise than considered recommendations, but perhaps traditional media should take note nonetheless.
Original article via Fast Company
Pic: Flickr
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I happened to be the contributor in that group that hazarded the idea to rent out the writers and content creators. Both of which came out of my mouth and I thought they were absurd at first. Later in the day, however, the idea was tossing around in my head and struck me as surprisingly worthy of further exploration. Glad to see that someone else agrees!
The exercise itself was great and we’ll be using it at Snepo for a few things in the near future.
Hi Scott
It’s definitely one of those ideas that seems a little nuts at first but given some thought …. I suppose like all good brainstorming sessions the idea is to get you thinking in ways you wouldn’t normally.
Personally, I think publishers across the board will need to consider new ideas along these lines if they are to maintain anything like their current size and structure. The alternative is to become increasingly niche market and consequently, much less mass market.
BTW, love the Snepo website.
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