Crisis ... or opportunity?
When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, that city's Times-Picayune newspaper began publishing only online. It had to. Its offices and printing plant were flooded. The city's streets were largely under water, preventing delivery even if a paper could have been printed. So out of necessity, the TP became the first American newspaper to become a purely Web-based operation, even if involuntarily and temporarily.
Two unrelated observers of the newspaper bidness have come to much the same conclusion regarding the McClatchy purchase of the Knight Ridder chain and the looming reselling of 12 of the KR properties.
Jay Rosen of PressThink wonders whether those 12 properties ought to take advantage of the fact that no one really owns them right now to transform themselves, quickly and permanently, into something that can survive, even thrive, in this era.
And Paul Chesser, a contributor to our religion pages a decade or so ago and now a writer for the John Locke foundation, has a piece up at The American Spectator's Web site suggesting that McClatchy use its monopoly position in some of the nation's more desirable markets to ditch print entirely, on the assumption that an educated readership will follow the product online if it isn't already there.
Could we be reaching a tipping point?