What If the Newspaper Industry Made a Colossal Mistake?

> As one anecdote, the paper ran an advertising campaign telling people not to use the website on Sundays.

... but why? What did they hope to achieve by that?

Some of the more dynamic content from the NYT is coming the closest to what I would want to pay a subscription for, but still far from my threshold to pay. Static word content that we once paid handsomely for (in terms of ad space and subscription fees) is regurgitated at far lower cost everywhere now.

But I've yet to see widespread adoption of content with active models to work with, even download and run for yourself, for example. Connected to databases holding the raw data that the story is about. With side-commentary, Torah-like (the Torah has a tradition of recording significant interpretations and amplifications made by past rabbis), possibly by multiple competing editors, summarizing swathes of comments into concise, cogent chunks that add to/update the original piece. Organized not just by time, but through/over time: so not presented only as a "this is what happened this hour/day/week" narrative, but in a Wikipedia-related fashion describing "this event that happened is placed in this context in our overall knowledge".

As an-ex journalist who recently left the industry to become a programmer, I'd say one of the issues is the short-sightedness of senior management. When I started teaching myself to code last year, I told my editor as well as a couple of other senior staff members (including the chief exec) about my ambitions to combine coding and journalism.

My editor was all for it but there was little she could do besides telling her boss about what I was doing and hoping that would lead to meetings for me with our in-house dev team based in London (I was at a regional paper owned by one of the biggest regional newspaper owners in the UK).

In the end I left because nothing happened. I appreciate senior staff members are busy with other stuff but I'd have thought somebody would have taken more of an active interest in what I was trying to do. One of the issues is that developers working for news firms are creating tools based on briefs from people who do not use those systems on a daily basis, so you end up with products with a poor UX for both readers and journalists.

I was a journalist for only 4 years (I was fortunate to get a job straight out of uni) but my sense is that we are spending too much time thinking about the content and not thinking deeply enough about the platforms serving that content. By that I don't mean building the next Facebook etc but starting creating platforms which will be one of the places we serve our content and possibly bring other sources of revenue. I imagine this would work better on a local/regional level because you could be more specific with your audience.

It's probably too late to do that now but I think the journalists who will be more successful in the future will be those building media firms which serve niche audiences but don't rely on content being their #1 source of income.

If your website is bad, and you create a new one that keeps the same core ideas but has new, fancy features from HTML5, you now most likely have a site that is both bad and baroque. Very few websites are bad because they were lacking the features HTML5 adds — they're bad because their creators want to do the wrong thing.

This article confuses the strategy for the newspaper industry as a whole with the strategy for any particular newspaper. If zero newspapers were online, then the first paper to go online would have a huge advantage. Every newspaper staying offline is not a Nash equilibrium, unless there's some compact to enforce it (which might violate antitrust laws).