Newspapers and new internet startups are having the same kind of problem(s) in two different areas.
Newspapers think salvation will be in doing the same old things in new ways , with less resources, less staff, fewer readers, and declining advertising reveneues. Think Web 1.0, the action the preceeded the bubble bursting. Do the same exact things you currently do, just do them online. Then you get others, like Mr. Tierney of PMH (Inquirer and Daily News), who wants to turn his news properties into MySpace – just an assemblage of reporter-created mixed-media, while daydreaming of owning the Wall Street Journal…
Then you have the plethora of internet startups, who are continuing pre-bubble-behavior with no financial bubble present – they hope for acquisition by one of the big five, which for most of them ain't gonna happen. When the attention-bubble pops, I suspect that the internet will be strewn with abandoned betas and broken code.
Both are suffering from a lack of entrepenuerism, and not in the traditional (entrepenuers are small business people) understanding of the word (I've spent the last week or so reading Peter Drucker's Innovation and Entrepreneurship).Print is trying to reinvent the industry, while internet startups are trying to invent products that some other industry will buy, with insufficient thought as to the impact their webapps are having in the big picture.
Both need to sit down and think out what they are doing and start thinking strategically, and focus on INNOVATING and not INVENTING (or re-inventing), in print's case. A good way for them to refocus their energies would be to stop focusing on how they do what they have been doing in a new format (or how to get acquired by being the newest bright and shiny object) to re-examining how people use and experience their products – as in what can I use this for.
