A Few Interesting Articles

I thought I'd share a few interesting links from last week about the future of newspapers.  Enjoy.

Google's Eric Schmidt's commentary on newspapers -- clearly Google has taken a lot of grief for the troubles of the newspaper industry.  Certainly, Google has wrenched economic value from newspapers not to mention a lot of other types of businesses -- but local media folks would probably do a lot better listening to Google than fighting Google.

Clay Shirky pointed out that a lot of "local newspapers" don't really have a lot of truly local content.  Yep.  You'll get no argument here.  This is why I've suggested before that a lot of newspapers can get unique content through crowdsourcing and other lower cost methods than they've perhaps used for many years.  Newspaper problems are fixed if you solve both the top and bottom line, and that's going to be painful on a few levels.

Finally, Fred Wilson mentioned something that we've seen for the better part of a year -- if local media is to survive, it needs to take advantage of its current (and possibly fleeting) local advertising sales force advantage.  Local media companies may very well survive as resellers of third-party or proprietary technologies that further monetize their local news audience.  More on that later!