Wistful thinking, seat-of-the-pants supposition and wild-ass guessing are hardly the ways to address the multibillion-dollar business problem underlying the journalism crisis that threatens the health of our democracy.
No competently managed business would think of taking such a haphazard approach to a challenge as potentially devastating as the press is facing today.
It’s time for editors, publishers, academics and foundations to pony up for serious, in depth and disciplined study of what consumers want, what they need and how journalists and media companies can provide it.
One of my favorite media critics, Alan Mutter, takes a hatchet to yet another conference tasked with finding new business models for journalism, this time at Harvard.
It seems like the conversation about the future of media has been the same for the last 5+ years.
