Tear down the factory, Part II
Regardless of the rhetoric, newspapers view themselves first and foremost as factories producing a product, not as information companies.
My first post on the subject suggested that gutting classifieds is a good start to changing the self-image of papers. In that post I mentioned Steve Outing’s new reinventingclassifieds.com, which offers up some innovative thinking. It’s a good site and I don’t want to pick on it or its users. But even among these innovative thinkers you find people tied to some pretty outdated ways of thinking about technology. Here’s an example:
“We need a better online ad placement system and/or verticals offering video/animation, all the bells and whistles at the point of sale. AND ALL THIS FROM ONE VENDOR!”
Software vendors are necessary at papers primarily because of obsolete production methods. Being reliant on these vendors, even the very best ones, limits what a newspaper can do. Until newspapers adapt to open-source, platform-independent software, they’ll be weighed down by their vendors. And these vendors are getting weaker all the time, because trying to run a software company with only a few hundred potential customers is not a very good business model.
In the case of classifieds, the need for specialized vendors virtually disappears with a few relatively minor changes to the business model:
- Make private-party ads free, or at least charge per ad, not by line, and billing becomes easy.
- Stop nickel-and-diming customers with silly upsells, and the software suddenly becomes pretty vanilla.
- Automate the process for web placement and you can survive with almost no staff, so you don’t need vendor workstations.
- Print classifieds in easy-to-read formats and you can use off-the-shelf publishing software.
Some of the software you need if you make the right changes is free. Some of it is a couple hundred dollars a workstation, instead of thousands. Hiring IT help is easier because employees don’t need to know or learn arcane proprietary systems.
Get out of the assembly-line factory thinking, and everything becomes cheaper and easier. “Change” no longer means endless vendor interviews and scary, problematic conversions; it becomes organic and fluid.
Tags: Classifieds
