Jason,

My other point to Howard was that dividing the two also reduces your competitive offering for advertisers. From my experience, advertisers want an integrated solution – something in the paper that drives people online to register, opt-in, communicate, etc. When the two are separate it leads to internal confrontations that I have witnessed destroy the advertiser deal entirely.

In fact, advertisers are producing their own “custom published” social media sites, to create what media properties are not.

Note, today Nielsen reports a $10 Billion, 15.6% drop in ad spending 1st 1/2 2009. The most significant drop is in local sunday supplements at 47%+. I wonder if those $ aren’t going right into to digital custom publishing.

K—

Lie #1: We can manage this disruption from within an integrated organization.

No you can’t.

Economic pressures over the past few years have led many newspaper execs to convince themselves that the integrated organization is the best option.

This will not work because the disrupted cannot manage their own disruption. Most newspaper employees are not qualified to do the strategic thinking required to manage disruption let alone create it in the form of new products that may challenge the core because they still see themselves as print newspaper employees. Just stating that you are a “news” company instead of a “newspaper” company doesn’t make it true.

I couldn’t agree more with Howard Owens analysis. The only way newspapers can ensure the survival of their brands and the journalistic principles they hold so dearly is to separate the web organization completely from the newspaper.

Clay Christensen talks about the “sucking sound of the core”. That’s exactly what is happening at news organizations around the world. The print product will always win because it still makes the most money, has the most people and cost associated with it and is where everyone feels comfortable.

It would be very difficult to sit at a boardroom table and convince the room that the focus should be on the thing that makes little money, has unlimited competitors and a very unclear future or path to profitability. Michael Nielsen gives a nice explanation of this here. The sensible manager will focus on managing the core even if it is in decline and that’s why the two operations cannot co-exist.