Where are the products?
This quote is from Elizabeth Osder who many will know from her days at the NYT. Sorry for the length, but I can not just post a link to http://www.inma.org, because the cover article to the March Issue of IDEA is behind a member wall.
However, maybe it inspires participants to push product innovation – and the requisites for a corporate newspaper culture of change that is “always-on” .
“A decade into the newspaper online revolution, the walls are coming down, the chaos of development and rapid product innovation has stabilised, and most newspapers are comfortable with their online strategies. They are managing the development and launch of new products to meet the growing and changing demands of online consumers.
But it is not over. The media landscape will continue to change. The explosive growth of the web is likely to have been the first of many potentially disruptive events in the history of newspapers. In the decade to come, there will be many more changes being played out around the world with a variety of product innovations that we are seeing today.
Examples of such global innovations are e-newspapers like the one recently launched by The Times of India and South Korea’s upstart OhmyNews that empowers citizen journalists and is getting almost a million visits per day.
Convergence is quickly becoming more than a buzzword and is happening in more places. In Japan, the Shizuoka Shimbun and regional television stationo SBS TV recently set up a synergy news desk. At many media companies, cross-media advertising sales are becoming more common.
Innovations in distribution, display and interactivity empowered by wireless broadband technologies will continue to change once-reliable economic models and create new expectations and demands from consumers.
From a decade of Mosaic-inspired entrepreneurship, the lessons I learned at Advance continue to be the best guide. Research and development must become seamless to a newspaper’s culture. Leadership must continue to embrace new technologies. And newspaper executives must always learn about their audience, while also learning from their audience.
How newspapers innovate new products will remain the key to their success. “
