And that’s the way it is….

In 1988 I toured a USA Today printing plant in Dallas. This was before the Internet… I remember being amazed at what I saw. I could have been walking through a manufacturing plant that made widgets for whatever… In this case the product being produced was a folded up newspaper ready for a truck to deliver the morning news throughout north Texas. There were no reporters to be seen, no man behind a glass cage barking orders out to tattered reporters. I probably saw no more than 5 people running the whole operations. USA Today had figured out how to deliver the news out of Washington DC via phone line and the only thing in Dallas was the printing press.
A year later the movie “Back to the Future” had a reference of the paper in the year 2025 or something like that. The whole world knew that USA Today knew how to handle the future. This is when I noticed the beginning of the end for traditional papers.
Fast forward a few years and you will realize that this oracle of the future news only had one brilliant idea. That was to take out the delivery of papers and print them locally. Thinking in a straight line, they began to grow worldwide… using the same business model only over a different area. Looking back now it’s easy to see… they got it partially right but they didn’t understand that they really were a manufacturing plant and they needed more than one brilliant idea to move into the future. The company was so focused on efficiency that they neglected the small part of the company that was actually discovering and writing news…. In 2004 there was a scandal that forced a front-page apology for “manufacturing” the news. They had cut their process to the bone and almost lost their product.
This year we have seen a rash of papers failing because they don’t understand that most of a paper’s business is an industrial business. It’s a business process of cutting down trees, making paper, hauling the raw product and then printing little words on the product and then gassing up trucks to deliver the paper. All this just in time to be usurped by some news event that happened at 6:00 in the morning a full 6 hours after the paper went to press. I get more new news out of my free twitter account than I do from a 6 hour old USA Today paper.
This, however is not why papers are failing… this is why they have been hurting for the last decade. The final blow came in a more subtle form…a method that has been lurking for decades in human civilization. A method of learning and communicating brought forward from the agricultural era and suppressed by the printing presses of the 15th century. Before the news was printed and read to a medieval person, he would walk into a crowded market and be bombarded with information throughout the day. He knew instinctively that it was up to him alone to decide what he heard during the day was true news or gossip. He alone decided what type of information he wanted and who he wanted to talk to. This agricultural era concept has been lost on the lives of industrial people.
In 1982 John Naisbitt coined the term Mass Customization. Ever since I read his book “Megatrends”, I have been waiting for customization on a massive scale and frankly I am pleased to see it. What amazes me the most however is the wrath of the people fighting it and rejecting it. This week I read an article in which the author stated: “It wouldn't be so scary if online local news could fill the void (of mainstream media), but that isn't happening.” This is just one example of how the ones in “newspaper power” are resisting as their empire slips away. I am enjoying watching this tremendously. This person just doesn’t get it at all…. The hundreds of ways to communicate now, not only fill the void but it’s like pouring water into a bucket of rocks… it simply fills every void imaginable. My question to you is: Can we humans rise to the occasion and accept this responsibility, burden, joy and power of deciding within our own skull what is right and what is wrong or will we opt for the easy and learned method of finding someone who says “And that’s the way it is…”