Business Week has this great in-depth piece about how a once-hot newspaper, The San Jose Mercury News, has fallen low due to the massive disruptions created by the Internet. That's a familiar story by now, but The Merc may be unique given that back in 1990, editor Robert D. Ingle predicted the technological forces that were about to erupt and worked mightily to get the paper and its then-parent company Knight Ridder to embrace digital publishing.
Ingle, however, was ultimately thwarted by the same forces that prevent most successful businesses from embracing innovation: corporate fiefdoms, pressure to meet short-term financial goals, interpersonal politics, resistance to change and myopic thinking.
Ultimately the San Jose Mercury News did make the necessary changes to compete in a world where Google, Craigslist and thousands of other sites are diverting straight into their own coffers what once used to be the newspaper world's revenues. For the San Jose Mercury News, as is true for most newspapers, the changes may be too late.
Knight Ridder was killed off by one of its investors. Since 2004, the Mercury News has operated under two different corporate owners, laid off hundreds of workers and eliminated entire sections of the paper. Even with Ingle's foresight, the Mercury News was still too late to ride the technological wave that has turned the newspaper business upside down.
Cynthia Brumfield at 10:02 AM|Comments(0)
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