Future of News: Nichepapers

Umair Haique's latest blog on the Harvard Business Publishing website (coincidentally called "Edge Economy") contains some pretty savvy economic advice for people in the business of selling newspapers: stop, and start over.

Many organizations are struggling to find new distribution strategies, ways to get people to pay for the same old product. Haique says this is the era of what he calls "nichepapers", that are making a product with their audience in mind. Here is an excerpt where he explains:

To reinvent the buying and selling of news, it's necessary first to reconceive the making of news. The AP's latest attempt at business model innovation, for example, is a heavyweight "rights management" system for the same old stuff. But protecting yesterday's "product" is exactly what prevented the music industry and Hollywood from rediscovering the art of value creation.

Nichepapers are, above all, "M" organizations. Today's radical innovators are confronting the truth that, because it failed the fundamental test of being meaningful, yesterday's news is, well, yesterday's news.

Nichepapers, in contrast, do meaningful stuff that matters the most. The great failing of 20th century news is that monopoly power became a substitute for meaningful value creation. At root, that's the lesson that newspapers are learning the hard way.