If we knew now what we knew then

In a paper presented more than 10 years ago at the AEJMC conference in 1998, Donica Mensing describes the fiscal situation for newspapers' online projects during the early transition to the web and made references to viability of radio and TV in the early and mid 20th Century. But it seems the challenges then were much different than they are now. The real problem was getting people to adopt radio or television, to invest in the appliance and to understand the value:

"The history of the commercial development of both radio and television provides
one perspective for evaluating the potential of the Web as a new medium. Radio
existed as a new form of mass media for more than a decade before advertising
provided a significant source of income. In the early years, "newspaper
publishers were among the first enterprises to own radio stations and provide
regularly scheduled programs..." (Fidler, 1997, p. 128). With no return on
investment except goodwill, however, most soon quit the medium. It was the
national radio networks and commercial sponsorships that ultimately provided the
market and financial resources to turn radio not only into a viable commercial
medium, but into a direct competitor with newspapers. (Fidler, p. 128).
Early television also had a difficult time attracting advertisers. The high
costs of programming and the increasing centralization of the medium caused many
regional producers and independent stations to cut back or go out of business.
In the end it was the largest radio networks, CBS and NBC, "which had the
resources to lose money (which they did) until the entire nation took up the TV
habit" (Baughman, p. 45)." (Mensing, 1998).

In our current struggles, we have no problem getting most people to use the web. Our issue is carving out niches for publications that can compete. Better comparisons might be magazines and cable shows/channels, which have a much greater rate of turnover than newspapers and which are seen as more temporal in nature.

So, perhaps what Jane Stevens is doing, what we're really looking for is a way to manufacture an addiction to news by designing products that utilize all the addictive qualities of the web. Instant "addiction" was relatively easy to achieve once adoption of radio and TV technologies took place. What we're doing now is competing at sort of the end-stage of development of the medium with very much old school ideas about information.

So, we should steal from niche magazines, the best of cable news (is there a best of cable TV news?) and, of course, the best of the web to create products that are both broad aggregators and creator/disseminators of information and capable of being focused on the individual.

Jane has been saying this all year to anyone who will listen. Hopefully this reiteration with a bit of reference to other media cannot hurt.