"All the talk about 'saving newspapers' is focused on finding new business models to keep doing what they've always done," writes blogger Scott Karp. "Which is like GM looking for a new business model to sell the kinds of cars they made in the 50s and 60s. What the newspaper industry, if it is to survive as such, must find is a radical new value proposition for news -- something so audacious, so self-evidently valuable that, if they can find a way to deliver it, would lead to the rebirth of newspaper journalism."

And that, the premise that journalism needs a fundamentally new model, means betting the farm, innovating - not to try to be the competition, but to be something not yet imagined by the competition, and in the process, perhaps learning from another "dying" industry.    

"Jonathan Rausch's piece on GM's last ditch effort to transform itself by producing the world's first mainstream electric car (after it failed to do so in the 90s)," writes Karp. "Is a tale of do or die innovation that everyone in the newspaper industry -- and media generally -- must read."
 
General Motors, after languishing for years in Toyota's shadow, following the mishandling of the EV1, and repeated cases of over-promising and under-delivering, needed not to create their own Prius, but get out of the catch-up game and write the rules to a new game.

"When one of the world's mightiest corporations throws everything it's got at a project, and when it shreds its rule book in the process, the results are likely to be impressive," writes Rausch.

Karp argues the journalism industry should be asking these same questions, "How can newspaper companies surpass the competition? How can they be better than Google?... and then pursuing bold answers... Newspapers need to stop trying to save the old business or searching amorphously for new business models and instead figure out what needs are going unmet in the market for news -- and then be first in the market to deliver breakthrough solutions."

Perhaps the "GM lesson" is to not fear ourselves and the capabilities within our industry, but also not fear the competition. Innovate, and do so openly.
   
If they fail, they will fail publicly, painfully so, but it is only in letting go that fear of failure, that they allow themselves grow beyond the industry they were, into the industry they will become.

Source: Publishing 2.0