James Surowiecki has an article in the New Yorker on the failure of
newspapers:
http://newyorker.com/talk/financial/2008/12/22/081222ta_talk_surowiecki
He makes a few good points from the economic development standpoint.
Here's an example:
<snip>
In a famous 1960 article called “Marketing Myopia,” Theodore Levitt
held up the railroads as a quintessential example of companies’
inability to adapt to changing circumstances. Levitt argued that a
focus on products rather than on customers led the companies to
misunderstand their core business. Had the bosses realized that they
were in the transportation business, rather than the railroad
business, they could have moved into trucking and air transport,
rather than letting other companies dominate. By extension, many argue
that if newspapers had understood they were in the information
business, rather than the print business, they would have adapted more
quickly and more successfully to the Net.
There’s some truth to this. Local papers could have been more
aggressive in leveraging their brand names to dominate the market for
online classifieds, instead of letting Craigslist usurp that market.
And while the flood of online information has made the job of
aggregation and filtering tremendously valuable, none of the important
aggregation sites, to say nothing of Google News, are run by a paper.
Even now, papers often display a “not invented here” mentality,
treating their sites as walled gardens, devoid of links to other news
outlets. From a print perspective, that’s understandable: why would
you advertise good work that’s being done elsewhere? But it’s an
approach that makes no sense on the Web.
</snip>
I'd read James' Wisdom of Crowds, but I hadn't realized how broad his
writing was:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Surowiecki
-- Owen
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
