Clay Shirky does a terrific job of laying out the scale of the disruption happening in local media equating it to the introduction of the printing press 500 years ago. Take a few minutes and read Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable.
Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply pointing out that the real world was looking increasingly like the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.
Once people and organizations realize the scale of the disruption, fresh thinking is required that isn’t solely looking through the prism of the previous dynamics.
With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.
The fresh thinking needs to touch every piece of the local media value chain from the tools to the production process to the nature of relationships with the organizations supporting the enterprise. The mindset defined by Mark Leslie’s Sales Learning Curve framework should be central as the entire organization needs to learn from the evolving customer preferences and feedback. The experimentation and learning culture Shirky espouses has to get applied from production through monetization.