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Here's my take: There is/was no commercial business model that could have saved most news publishers. This is not a case of product commodification, it's a case of total de-commercialization of news as an industry. Cc @skok @emilybell @niccomele 1/8
Internet platform economics were going to swamp the majority of publishers no matter what -- there is (almost) no market for their products any more; not because they couldn’t make one, but because that’s not how internet economics work (see @benthompson @stratechery). 2/8
Even with an early, high paywall & an aggressive pivot to reader revenue (which, granted, most publishers didn’t do), the costs of print & delivery (of the product making the most gross revenue) would still not be covered in a majority of small/mid-sized newspaper publishers. 3/8
Add in the aggressive roll-ups/consolidation/asset stripping (that is so well documented by @businessofnews and explained by @kendoctor) and I think there isn’t much small/mid-sized publishers could have done to save themselves from “digital disruption.” 4/8
No doubt first click free helped kill the business model for small and mid-sized news publishers -- Facebook was the nail in the coffin -- but gas on the fire was private equity and industry consolidation. 5/8
In fact, I think many more small/mid-sized news publishers would still have a decent business were it not for the brutal managerial economics of private equity ownership. Not as great as when they were printing money in the old days, but still okay. 6/8
It’s tempting to apply disruptive innovation theory to all cases of technical change, but also dangerous when bigger, secular trends are afoot. Even digital-native commercial news publishers have been struggling--which signals underlying digital news economics mostly suck. 7/8
Takeaway: the news industry is going through de-commercialization due to consolidation & internet economics, not commodification & disruption. We need a new set of non-market policies and strategies for reconstructing the news ecosystem. See, for example, @journalismproj 8/8 End
