Innovation Often Means Doing Less

Mike Masnick links to Peter Abraham, a sports reporter who covers the Yankees. Abraham worries about the future of his profession:

I’m usually flattered if some other blog links to my work. I figure anything that brings more readers here has to be good. But for every responsible blogger out there, there are other who cut and paste the work of others and either pass it off as their own or barely credit the author.

If you know the solution, contact the newspaper industry because you will be a well-paid consultant. The problem will soon be this: If newspapers decide they can’t afford beat writers, where will that information come from? Somebody has to get on the plane, go to Toronto and ask the questions.

Mike’s observations about this are astute as always: rip-off blogs rarely get much traffic, and it’s not obvious that the world needs a dozen people covering the Yankees. But the thing that caught my eye was that last sentence: “Somebody has to get on the plane, go to Toronto and ask the questions.”

84655830_c671f4b359_o

Actually, no they don’t. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, there are a lot of people in Toronto. Many of them are good writers. Some of them even cover sports for a living. And the Internet makes it easy to transmit content from place to place. So there are plenty of places the information can “come from,” and plenty of ways information about the game in Toronto can get back to readers in New York.

Most obviously, Toronto presumably has sports reporters of its own. They presumably cover Yankees away games. So one obvious approach would be for New York publications to syndicate the content of Toronto publications when the Yankees are in Toronto, and for the opposite to occur when the Blue Jays are in New York.

Now, I don’t necessarily think this is the best way to do sports reporting. And I don’t think we’re headed for a grim future when reporters can never afford plane tickets. But Abraham is asking the wrong question. The question is: “how do we make sure fans have good coverage of their favorite sports teams?” Maybe that will continue to involve Abraham flying to Toronto. But maybe it won’t; the Internet may help us come up with better ways of doing things.

2815043167_6f887ef011

That might sound like nitpicking, but I think it illustrates an important point about the kinds of arguments newspaper partisans make. More often than not, they start from the assumption that newspapers need to continue doing all the stuff they’re doing now, and then they complain that their revenues are no longer sufficient to cover those costs.

Innovation often involves abandoning an old, expensive process in favor of a new, cheaper one. We don’t have as many telephone operators, linotype operators, or stenographers as we used to because we developed technologies that allow us to do those jobs a lot more efficiently. And it’s because of these kinds of changes that businesses have been able to cut costs, lower their prices, and ultimately make us all richer.

So it’s important to distinguish between reporting in the abstract and the particular activities of today’s dominant news firms. The former is important and worth preserving. The latter simply isn’t. And when you equate the two, you wind up reasoning backwards: trying to figure out how to finance unnecessary expenditures rather than thinking about which expenditures are unnecesary. The problem is that if you’ve spent your whole professional life working at newspapers, as many print reporters have, it can be rather difficult to see the difference.

This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

4 Responses to Innovation Often Means Doing Less

  1. eee_eff says:

    But the thing that caught my eye was that last sentence: “Somebody has to get on the plane, go to Toronto and ask the questions.”

    Actually, no they don’t. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, there are a lot of people in Toronto

    Yes, this is part of a trend others have noticed, too. I call it the intelligent relocalization of labor. One thing that interests me about it is that is happening in so many area, and here it is in manufacturing, where the design of a whole class of products has been influenced by this process. Of course this is also more sustainable:

    http://enigmafoundry.wordpress.com/2006/10/22/globalization-de-materialized-in-176-clicks/

    BTW, Glad to see you started your own blog.

  2. Innovation often involves abandoning an old, expensive process in favor of a new, cheaper one.

    I completely agree. No problem is ever perfectly understood, so continually asking what lies at the root of the problem and questioning the status quo are vital activities for improving the degree to which the needs of customers/users/readers/citizens/etc. are met.

  3. I’m currently about 1/3 through The Innovator’s Dilemma (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060521996/associatizer-20/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innovator%27s_dilemma) which does a great job of what happens to business as technology evolves.

    Blogs, news aggregators, and craigslist represent disruptive technologies to the traditional print media industry. When they were first on the radar, they were so low margin and small market that any newspaper would have been crazy to take resources away from its existing business model. Why have writers spend time blogging, which has no advertising revenue opportunity, when they could be working on content for the print side, which makes money? Newspapers rationally kept their resources trained on their existing revenue engines.

    I could go on, and probably do a poor job summarizing the book. It’s an interesting read — very informative as we see old business die and new ones spring up.

  4. Wow, Erik, you read my mind. The Innovator’s Dilemma is a great book, and I’m planning to do some posts making exactly the point you’re suggesting here.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.