One strategy newspapers have employed has been to try to ensure that online revenue growth outpaces the annual decline of print and to adjust investment accordingly. But Innosight’s Anthony says executives facing disruptive change should utilize technology to improve their old business too—not just to build the new.

In December 2006, Wall Street Journal Publisher L. Gordon Crovitz published an open letter to his readers, telling them that as the paper’s website has been so effective in covering breaking news on a 24/7 basis, the print paper would start producing more “analysis.” (Subsequently, the Journal drastically reduced the size of its print product’s format.)

Small and midsize newspapers across the country have begun trending in that direction too. At the Seattle Times, Executive Producer Stanley Farrar says analysis is “the most important thing we do.” People working in the industry claim the strategy of defining different roles for the online and print products has given many newspapers a new sense of purpose and more optimism about their future. Newspaper-killer Newmark adds, “At some newspapers, they’re making good progress using the new technology to do a better job,” he says. “At others, they’re using new technology as an excuse.”

How Quick and Dirty Can Win the Race
Newspapers have informed the world of their plight. “Read any newspaper,” says David Thurm, VP and CIO of the New York Times. “We report a lot about ourselves.”

Lately, however, newspapers have quit whining. They don’t have time for it. Workforces have been trimmed and in some cases obliterated (the Boston Globe closed its last three foreign bureaus in January), replaced with news from wire services—all during a time when they’re being asked to produce more than ever. Rather than lament past missteps, many papers have begun leveraging the Internet to reach customers in ways once never thought possible. (See “Newspapers Turn Readers Into Content Contributors,” for one new approach.) At the small- and mid-market papers, where resources have been stretched especially thin, there’s no time for perfectionism when implementing technology. Instead, Innosight’s Anthony says, the mantra should be “good enough,” a critical concept when dealing with disruptive technologies.

When the good enough theory is applied to an industry steeped in idealism, it’s sometimes interpreted as degrading the mission. But papers employing the strategy disagree, noting it’s mostly rooted in finding effective yet economical technology to use in delivering their products.

At the Delaware News Journal, for instance, readers wanted to see more video accompanying breaking news on their site, Delawareonline.com. Photographers needed the ability to shoot video in the field, return to the newsroom, edit it and post it on the website as quickly as possible. Initially, the paper bought two top-of the-line $4,000 Sony cameras with very expensive software to accompany them. “There was a pretty steep learning curve,” says Pankaj Paul, the News Journal’s managing editor of niche and new initiatives. Consequently, only two people could effectively upload and edit video using the complex software, which could take hours—enough time to be scooped by another website. So Paul went the good enough route and bought six Canon and Panasonic videocameras for about $400 each. Further simplifying matters, photographers on staff already had Macs that came equipped with Apple’s user-friendly iMovie software for video editing. Paul says the picture quality wasn’t outstanding, but it worked. “All you have to do is make sure it looks decent,” he says. “We’re not doing HD here.”