I just read Robert Scoble's "The worst thing for Twitter" about how if Twitter got bought by IBM or Adobe or some such outfit that would be even worse for it than being bought by Google.
A wave of emotion rushed over me. And it had nothing to do with any of those potential suitors. It has to do with newspapers.
I haven't written much about the death of newspapers, as I think there is about as much of a saturated market on that angle as there are "Social Media Experts" on Twitter. I started working in newspapers, worked five years at The American Press Institute, ran the web site for every We Media conference, and went to the same school / worked at the same school newspaper as Jayson Blair. I know pretty intimately, the reasons for the death of newspapers.
I thought about an alternate universe where as an ultimate act of swinging for the fences, every newspaper got together and made a bold, expensive gamble similar to the $1.1 trillion Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, Lula Ignacio de Silva, Manmohan Singh, Hu Jintao and the rest of the G20 pledged to the International Monetary Fund yesterday.
The action I pictured for newspapers: Buying Twitter. In a consortium brokered by either the World Association of Newspapers or the Newspaper Association of America. In early 2008. Or at least after Facebook was rebuffed.
I have for years lamented decisions, big and small, that were made by newspapers that adversely affected their bottom lines. From straightforward steps like creating easier interfaces for purchase images both breaking local events, as well as from a paper's archives, or learning the lessons of Craigslist and Monster.com and applying those to their often awful relationships with funeral home directors to protect their lucrative obituaries section from outside threats. [Disclosure: during a stint as Sr. Editor, Obits and Fun at Eons, I helped build the precursor to Tributes.com and may or may not have shares in that spinoff.]
Some of these things wouldn't have cost a dime.
@chadrem
But I digress.
Imagine if every newspaper was a part owner of
Twitter. Newspapers could have matched their extensive ownership of
local data about people's lives and issues that affect them, to a
search engine and service that is the virtual equivalent of sticking a
USB port into the brains of thousands and ultimately millions of people
around the world.
Imagine if a database matched up the
geotargeting power of Twitter to the regions most covered by every
newspaper in the consortium. Amazing product ideas and services could
be developed. The audience would think their newspapers were psychic.
Five years after the sale, no one would be talking about the threat of
Google News to the newspaper industry. Critics would have to choose
their words more carefully when describing the "myopic newspaper industry"
Had such a consortium existed, this year's World Association of Newspapers forum, which was postponed for economic reasons
could have instead been a giddy "what's next?" celebration about all
they ways the industry could use this growing and powerful new toy.
Mashups could have been concocted, research reports could have been
shared. Pats on the back could have been given as the industry figured
out how to turn "Trending Topics" into targeted readership, better
brand loyalty, and ultimately more revenue.
I'll admit I don't
have all the dots connected on this one. But I've worked in or with all
four elements between newspapers, their own web sites, their
competitors web sites, and most recently with various tools that are possible to build on top of Twitter. So I know it's possible.
But I'm guessing we'll never know.
