A remarkable analysis of the failure of Rocky Mountain News by its former President and Publisher.

Remarkable for its candor, but not really for its insights. Traditional print news has learned how to use the web, but none of that changed the intractable economic problems caused by new media. You simply can't extract those old-timey revenues from the web.

Businesses are in fact, small cultures that have developed to fill a particular economic niche. Change the environment, and invariably the business organisms that have evolved to fill that niche will simply go extinct.

John Temple makes all the typical mistakes--even now. He insists that the problem lay in the newspapers truncated vision of their business as "print edition", but fails to recognize that a business isn't a vision of itself, but a machine for making money. Regardless of the vision or the technology, if you aren't booking the revenues, its just a really cool hobby.

I am frankly quite surprised that we are "still here" at this point, wondering about how to make the news business pay. I think the answer is pretty simple--people pay according to scarcity. What this translates to in the information business is "information that nobody else has...", and not just a scoop here and there, but in a consistent way.

Rupert Murdoch gets it. His purchase of the Wallstreet Journal implicitly recognized that business news fits the model of scarce information. He can leverage that scarce information across many different platforms and extract revenues from all of them, with the medium being essentially irrelevant.

I was reminded of this dynamic the other day while using Google. Google is great at finding stuff that people want other people to have access to, but if I want to find truly valuable information, I'm just out of luck. The stuff really worth knowing just isn't there, and for obvious reasons--its valuable, and thus not freely shared.

Ironically, for all the criticism its gets for its outdated web presence, the Drudge Report is the real model for a modern information business. Drudge and its many derivative sites, commonly exploit networks of hundreds, thousands and hundreds of thousands of correspondents to consistently elicit rare information. Drudge doesn't pay these people a nickel, but simply provides a vast national (and international) audience for a prospective whistle-blower to avail themselves of. More than a few media whales have admitted that they check Drudge the first thing when they come into the office.

...and that's the way it is.