Mark Pincus, founder of Tribe.net comments about the Adam Lashinsky’s piece in Fortune about News Corp.’s online strategy. Pincus ‘advises’ Rupert Murdoch to throw a ton of money at Craigslist. While publishers around the world would celebrate the move, if it were successful – because of the impact Craigslist is having on classified revenues – it would be a huge risk for News since much of the success of the not for profit Craigslist is due to social goals rather than commercial goals. Translating that into a commercial venture would be an enormous challenge and the Craigslist community would soon find or create another free and socially focused place in which to play.
As a goal though it makes sense for News as do some of the other strategies proposed by Pincus such as using local papers to drive the online business; unleashing existing News media businesses (Fox etc) to leverage citizen content.
I started thinking of what I would do if I was in control of News and quickly my mind turned to what I should do through my newsagency and other newsagencies I might influence as News will take care of itself. (Australia has 4,600 newsagencies. 50% of our revenue comes from newspapers and magazines and around of other sales are as a result of newspaper generated traffic. We have no online component yet.) So, what I would do? Play online; make myself indispensable to publishers; dramatically improve customer service; take a lead on citizen journalism and become a gateway for people to get published; shift my reliance onto other product categories less likely to be impacted by an online model.
While it is interesting to speculate about how publishers should respond to the disruption caused by new technologies, it is equally important to consider how those at the end of the news and information supply chain should/could respond.