Answer Guy Central

Or at least it could be.

So remember Rupert Murdoch’s insistence that Google pay him for access to News Corp’s on-line content? Remember the rumor that Murdoch’s News Corp would do a deal with Microsoft Bing to have only that search engine “see” his stuff? Here comes the next bomb. And while it looks like pretty much nothing at the moment, get ready for the explosion.

Working with The New York Times and The Washington Post, Google is now testing Living Stories. At the moment there’s really nothing there to get excited about, and honestly I’m not sure of the number of people who will ever care about a string of stories about one topic (unless that topic is Tiger Wood’s extramarital activities, of course). But Google Living Stories matters, because it points to real collaboration between Google and the newspapers that both need Google to keep them alive and hate Google for making their content ubiquitous.

And that’s the business change lesson of the day: sometimes baby steps add up to something, and having Google and two of his chief competitors talking and working together will force Mr. Murdoch’s hand. The movement itself is the reward here, and search engines, newspapers, and consumers will all win.

What are you doing to change your business?

The Great Man Has Spoken.

Rupert Murdoch has been sounding pretty stupid for the last year or so, talking ad nauseum about how the Internet can be overcome and we can all be forced to pay for the content we consume.

Uh-oh. I think he might be right.

The lord of Newscorp is looking at Amazon’s Kindle book reader and thinking he finally has the business change model to get back the revenue that his print outlets have been losing, and even add new revenue for broadcast. Here’s how it will work: As we all start using “devices” (Kindle, advanced mobile phones, whatever), we also learn to add content to them. It’s true; I have more media streaming into my Droid then I ever read simply because “there’s an app for that”.

Well, what if the apps that show content required subscriptions? And what if the folks who create that content simply stop putting their content on-line in places where search engines like Google can find them? Bang. Newspapers get subscribed to again, and even previously-free TV outlets can create viewership revenue.

I was beginning to think that Mr. Murdoch was a dinosaur. I’ve changed my mind. And you’re about to change the way you use the internet. Get your strategy together, now.

By the way: the part of the interview where he talks about this topic starts at about 1:50 of the video.

Umm, No.

So last week, AOL’s latest CEO Tim Armstrong started talking about some plans afoot at the once-and-never-again online activity leader. And I’m glad to see that Tim has a plan.

And it isn’t going to work.

The good news: Mr. Armstrong has quite the media pedigree. Seriously, this guys the real deal, experience-wise. The bad news: this is the same plan AOL used in the 1990s. It created mediocre content then, and will do something even worse now. It is not business change.

AOL used to produce their own content and hoped people would buy/follow it. “Buy” is a reference to the position AOL once held as huge (paid) ISP to the non-tech-savvy masses, and “follow it” is about AOL’s total control over what appeared on their closed service.

The other thing AOL did was license content, and pay pretty solid commissions. I wrote IYM Software Review between 1989 and 1995, and in the final four years of that period watched both my readership and income soar under a deal with AOL. And then they proposed cutting what they paid me by 99%. And so I discovered the Internet

Back in the day content producers were on staff (or in the case of IYM contracted) and well-enough paid to be controlled . What is AOL going to offer content producers today?

So that’s the bad news. While business change can sometimes be repackaging of old ideas, this is an idea with nothing behind it. Journalists and media producers are paid less and less as the number of choices increases, and AOL is not going to magically create enough mass to get folks to write for them exclusively without paying them; and they can’t afford that.

Silk Purse/Sow’s Ear, understand?

I’m all about business change. This isn’t it.

Craig Newmark is a very smart man. Sure, you can be cynical and look at Craigslist as a fluke, or a ‘first-to-market’ that got lucky and think otherwise, but that would be a mistake. The guy continues to churn out one smart business change after another at the service that bears his name, and has become a featured commentator at Huffington Post, where that blog’s huge numbers give Mr. Newmark a very large platform for stating his opinions.

And wow, is he ever on the mark this week. Yesterday, Craig’s list of what he thinks is wrong with the publishing business started things off, and then he went one step further and skewered the music labels for the way they have mismanaged business change.

Have you noticed how little promotion goes into musical acts? It didn’t used to be that way, and with all respect to what even my kids agree is a relative lack of talent in their generations’ musicians relative to earlier acts it’s really about the way record labels handle artists. No, they don’t have much incentive to make big investments in acts that will get to at most three albums, but then . . . what IS their purpose?

In the era of iTunes and Internet Concerts more and more artists understand that they have no good reason to sign with a label. EVERYONE seems to understand this, except the labels, who hang onto the same old business models that used to work for them.

Lack of business change acumen will kill your business. Don’t let what’s happening to newspapers and record labels happen to you.

OK, So Computers Don’t Care that the ongoing demise of the printed word is their fault. The Internet doesn’t care either. But there sure is a lot of talk about this kind of change floating around lately!

This week, there’s an article in Time Magazine bemoaning not the death of newspapers, but their new form as they struggle for life. And the answer? Maybe newspapers need to be in the local news business.

I was watching RealSports on HBO the other night, and Mr. Gumbel and Mr. DeFord were bemoaning the death of local sports coverage. And their point was well-taken: where will analysis of local content (like sports) come from if newspapers die?

The bigger question of course, is about the form of change, and not merely that change in business, the world at large, the media business in particular, or whatever is happening. Newspapers have always been best at serving their local audiences; listen to how almost everyone talks about USA Today, for example. Do you know anyone that likes it?

As the Internet continues to evolve, we’ll see more and more local content produced. It’s a question of hitting your niche. Newspapers may in fact stop “printing”, but they’ll continue to be needed in some form. And so yeah, computers care about newspapers, because without them growth will stop. And that’s not good for computers, businesses, or you and I.