Crawling Out Of The Stone Age?
It was just a one story in the middle of my woefully neglected RSS reader (350 unread feeds – yikes), so I almost blew right threw it, but fortunately, the headline caught my eye before I did: “LA Times Invests in Social News Site Mixx.” Not earth-shattering news, but for someone like me who worked in and still has a lot of fondness for the newspaper industry, this was almost shocking, but also very encouraging.
Everyone has heard the problems newspapers are dealing with – declining readership, hemorrhaging money – but what has been the constant through all these troubles is that newspaper companies have been loathe to invest even the most minimal amount of money in online media properties. Rather than immediately embracing the world’s biggest – and free – publishing platform, newspaper companies have instead been adversarial toward new media, leaving companies like Google, Yahoo!, Time Warner and others to establish themselves as online content powerhouses.
It’s always been amazing that an industry full of very smart, talented people could fail to make the logical leap from paper to computer screen, but the industry has traditionally been slow to adapt and change. At the paper I was at until June of 2006, a group of younger reporters practically had to beg management to get a blogging system up and running. Imagine that – a group of professionals offering to perform their services (in the case writing) for free and a company refusing it.
That’s why the news about the LA Times investing in Mixx was so heartening. It wasn’t much, Mixx certainly isn’t a smoking hot property, and it may be a bit too late, but it’s encouraging to see a newspaper company at least try to buy a stake online. After all, if you create, buy, trade and sell information, doesn’t it make sense to establish yourself on the biggest medium for information in human history?
Just asking.
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