I have spent the better part of the past three years looking at the local media industry and trying to figure out how to work with it. What strikes me is that there are lots of great ideas out there for growing the business, and the leading newspapers are starting to give them serious attention. First, invest in the new technologies. I recently read that it took 40 years for the number of phones to reach 10 million people, 20 years for fax machines to do it, 5 years for the PC to do it, and one year for 10 million people to get email addresses. Of course, between twitter, smart phones, iPad apps and now the rest of the tablet offerings...all of which get adoption at the 10m level in one Christmas season, never mind a year, there is incredible adoption for communications tools going on out there, and it is all changing the way we communicate. Second, pick your battles. I just read an article from Mark Cuban, the Dallas mavericks' owner, describing how espn.com has a twitter problem, because if people can get their instant updates from somewhere else, they won't spend as much time clicking around espn.com, which is where the ad revenue comes from. In the local world, however, there are new technologies making it easier and easier to collect information and to engage with your community members, assuming you are listening to what is important. In the high school sports space, there are at least 4 different companies that help athletic directors manage and distribute schedules, at least a hundred others that provide video services of one kind or another, more blogs about high school sports than you can imagine, and literally thousands of articles that get written by newspapers that keep edging closer to the iceberg of bankruptcy, fiddling away. (How's that for a mixed metaphor?). More and more national services are edging into the area, and yet everyone recognizes that the key advantage rests with local reporters who can cover local events with a depth, breadth and quality that national services will never be able to compete with. The challenge is - where can they get the resources to keep up with the rapidly changing technology landscape? Our view is that they should be partnering with those companies that are developing the technology and services, incorporating them into their thinking, and working from strength, creating more and more great content that capitalizes on their unique perspectives in the communities they serve. Am I just crazy, or isn't that inevitably what local media will be doing?
