How To Survive The Modern World

This caught my eye because the proximate cause for the post was the newspaper in my former hometown of Rochester, New York, the Democrat and Chronicle. Now we always referred to it as the Demagogue and Comical, but that's beside the point. Doc Searls has a post that riffs off from that ruckus and tells dinosaur newspapers how to survive in a changing world. He is spot on, too. Newspapers that follow this advice will not only survive, but will almost certainly thrive into the foreseeable future. There are ten things the newspapers can do to survive.

As Tim Rutten reports (and I pointed to yesterday), the LA Times has a monetary value of $2.5 billion and "a balance-sheet-engorging 20% margin". So why does Wall Street hate it?

Simple: Because newspapers are a rusty industry. They have tail fins. They print lists of readers every day on the obituary page. Worse, as a class they are resolutely clueless about how to adapt to a world that is increasingly networked and self-informing. And Wall Street knows that.  

So, to help the papers out (as I did for public radio on Tuesday), I immodestly offer ten hopefully helpful clues.

First, stop giving away the news and charging for the olds. Okay, give away the news, if you have to, on your website. There's advertising money there. But please, open up the archives. Stop putting tomorrow's fishwrap behind paywalls. Writers hate it. Readers hate it. Worst of all, Google and Yahoo and Technorati and Icerocket and all your other search engines ignore it. Today we see the networked world through search engines. Hiding your archives behind a paywall makes your part of the world completely invisilble. If you open the archives, and make them crawlable by search engine spiders, your authority in your commmunity will increase immeasurably. Plus, you'll open all that inventory to advertising possibilities. And I'll betcha you'll make more money with advertising than you ever made selling stale editorial to readers who hate paying for it. (And please, let's not talk about Times Select. Your paper's not the NY Times, and the jury is waaay out on that thing.) 

Second, start featuring archived stuff on the paper's website. Link back to as many of your archives as you can. Get writers in the habit of sourcing and linking to archival editorial. This will give search engine spiders paths to wander back in those archives as well. Result: more readers, more authority, more respect, higher PageRank and higher-level results in searches. In fact, it would be a good idea to have one page on the paper's website that has links (or links to links, in an outline) back to every archived item.

Read the rest. I think it's probably the best set of solutions to what ails the legacy media that I have seen yet.