I still get home delivery of the NYTimes every day.  I am on vacation right now and am devouring The World in 2009 issue of The Economist.  Print media still has incredible content that the world wants (and needs!) to read.  Yes, they must shift content more to commentary, trends, and interviews than news (which the web has covered).  But even with this shift, their business model flat out does not work.  Here is my prescription on how to get it to work:

1.  Work together.  The music industry had no answers to their changing model and the whole thing got figured out by Steve Jobs.  Don't let this happen.  Form a real body to work on this together.  You will need to cooperate.

2.  Agree as a group to stop printing in 6 months.  Yes, that's right.  You are no longer print media.  The costs of creating and distributing your product simply don't make sense.  You have to go cold turkey.  This is a fixed cost piece of your business and it needs to be eliminated totally or you get little benefit.

3.  Get behind a digital reader.  You still have time to get control of this new format.  The Kindle is a book reader.  You need to get behind a media reader.  The beauty of your product is the random access of seeing lots of content and choosing at will.  The Kindle is a linear reading device.  I am desperate to get rid of my paper format of the Times, but the Kindle is not the answer.  You need something that will replicate the paper/magazine as we are used to consuming.  It needs to be color and it needs to be larger than the kindle (but just as thin as the 2.0).  It also needs a touch screen so you can see a typical front page and click into the paper.

4.  Give a free reader to all your subscribers.  Yes, make it free.  Ship it to all of them.  And, here is one reason why cooperating makes sense.  Combine your databases and if you share subscribers, you jointly cover the costs.  But, you will get readers into millions of hands.  Honestly, my hunch is this will cost FAR less than your inefficient distribution system.

5.  Now you own the whole chain and have much lower operating costs.  You control the device and the distribution.  There are lots of ways to monetize.  Make money on the device (for other types of users).  Sell books.  Whatever.  Sell cheaper subscriptions.  Getting a magazine now is a click away.  You no longer pay the postal systems millions.  You no longer own trucks.  You no longer own printing presses.

6.  Make the web work for you.  Add real time content along with your "scheduled" releases.  Make some content freely available on the web, but all of it is only for subscribers.  You will get people to pay because it feels like a subscription (and they get the device).  But, you have to add to the experience and use the power of the web to enrich your content.

Of course this plan has many hard issues to work through.  But, it avoids the slow death facing these great media companies.  They need to be bold in embracing the new world.  They need to take control of their destiny.  They need to view it as an opportunity.  If executed well, my guess is they could transform a broken business into a great one.

 

UPDATE: Some signs that some media is paying attention.  This is all incremental.  They need to get bold.

http://www.jacksonsun.com/article/20090201/COLUMNISTS01/902010306

Consider some of the many experiments being conducted by newspaper companies during this time of change. The Christian Science Monitor has ceased printing its newspaper in favor of an online edition. The Detroit News (owned by Gannett, the largest newspaper/media company in the world) will soon go to three days a week for home delivery. The other days will be online only. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer (Hearst Newspapers) will cease printing after March. The New York Times offers its print product in an exact page-by-page reproduction, ads and all, available for online home delivery.

UPDATE:  SF Chronicle at a critical phase.  

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/Hearst-says-cuts-needed-SF/story.aspx?g...

 

Thanks to Dave Winer for pointing me to this:

"The real-time web is not the threat. Google can index data in seconds. The larger issue is when search engines can't see data."

This is Google's Matt Cutts tweet on the recent set of discussions sparked by my post and other comments earlier this week on the potential threat Twitter poses to the core Google search franchise. 

I find this tweet fascinating, and actually, an admission of the issue.   Why?

First off, as Dave W. is quick to point out, Twitter could absolutely limit access to the data.  There are plenty of ways to do this without limiting the service users love so much.  Yes, all the posts are on public web pages and would remain there, but I can think of several ways Twitter could keep a real leg up on the data.

But, let's assume Google can see and use the data as much as it wants.  I think that is likely to be the case.  The real issue is they won't!  Google is committed to their method, their algorithm, their "indexing."  Matt admits this.  Google has billions of capex, hundreds of PhDs, and years of massive success behind their formula.  They can incorporate Twitter data into their index and make their search marginally better.  It will be one of hundreds of inputs.  My point is Twitter has the data for a whole new system that has the potential to be radically better and cheaper (no need to cache the entire internet!).  That is the only way Google can even possibly be threatened.  Microsoft is trying to replicate Google's approach.  It has and will fail.  Google is world class at what it does.  Only a disruption could threaten it.  That is the point behind this whole discussion.  Twitter is indeed a disruption.

Finally, Matt confirms this is already happening.  Where did we get the best data on how Google thinks about this issue?  TWITTER!  And, look at this comment to my earlier post:

I use search.twitter for everything now. I ask my my followers on Twitter their opinions on new movies before I go to Google or even Answers on Yahoo... Twitter is rapidly growing for real time results and answers. The information you see on your feed beats television or Google hands down...

Denying Twitter has unique information on the ranking of web content is denial.  But, it also does not mean Google is dead.  No way.  I am just saying Twitter has more to bring to that quest than the billions being spent by Yahoo, Microsoft and others.

As Google’s search share approaches 85%, there is constant debate over who could possibly challenge them.  Some mighty  forces (e.g. Ballmer, Wales, Diller) have aligned against them, but the lead just keeps growing.

I have seen the threat.  It is Twitter.  I have no idea if search is part of their soon to be announced business plan, but I sure think it should be.  

Searching Today

I do almost all searching in my firefox search bar.  Recently I noticed that I am changing the settings there frequently.  Google used to get 100% of my queries.  Today, I bet Twitter is getting at least 10% of them.  There are some things Twitter is just flat out better at for getting information than Google.     Here are just a few:  researching companies, products and services for real customer feedback, breaking news and live events/conference updates.  It is not a total threat but Twitter is so superior in these areas that people will indeed make the effort to search somewhere new to get the information.  I do.

These are not net new searches either.  Just today, I found myself wanting to get information on the to be released Audi Q5 (a candidate to replace my 10 year old acura).   My first instinct was to search twitter to see if there was any news.  Indeed there was:  http://search.twitter.com/search?q=audi+q5  The same search on google was pretty much worthless.  A month ago I would have just looked at Google.  

Can Twitter monetize this?  Well, Google sure has.

It’s all about the Data – Human Powered Search

So Twitter has value as a niche search engine today.  Who cares?  No one really.  But, there is more.  Twitter is building a human powered search indexing engine.  It is an engine that will build better results than any rules based index and has gotten millions of people super motivated to contribute for free every day (even though they don’t know it).    

If you are a Twitter user you will quickly see this in action.  The most common tweet is a link and some small insight.  The value of this link and the insight (which is great context) is instantly voted on.  Do people respond?  Do people retweet?  If so, relevance is very high.  If not, well, it does not matter much.  

The system of followers is a market based system that guarantees integrity.  If you simply use twitter to sell your agenda, it won’t be long until you have no followers.  You become noise – that no one hears.   All this is data that can be harnessed to create a search system around any topic.  

  Let me give you an example.  The Rackspace cloud division, Mosso, has a blog.  If you type “mosso blog” on google, you get a link to the mosso blog and bunch of links to posts.  I know for a fact that none of the links direct you to our most read post.  I also know for a fact that Twitter knows what our most read post is.  It was retweeted more than any other.  They have the data.  Google does not (or they have to look a lot harder to get it).  This same information disparity exists across all sorts of potential queries.  They have the opinions of millions of people on what really matters.  

This data is gold.  If Twitter’s model includes some tax to using the system (as some have proposed), I think they are crazy.  The more info they get, the more value they create.  How will they use it?  Well, we will see.  But, if I was Google, I would be paying attention.

 

Update:  follow up post given all the response and chatter on these ideas:  http://lewmoorman.com/google-we-have-a-problem