Because paper is scarce. And so is time.
Andy Kessler has an excellent piece in today's Wall Street Journal titled A Future For Newspapers. (In case that last link leads you to a paywall, Andy has the whole thing on his blog as well. That rocks.) Here's where Andy sees the hope:
Context & Ripple Effects
Andy Kessler's "A Future for Newspapers" runs in the Wall Street Journal the same week the paper's parent Dow Jones sits at the center of Rupert Murdoch's takeover approach, with a key holder publicly opposing the bid — so an op-ed arguing newspapers still have a future lands inside the very company whose ownership is in play.
The piece slots into a running debate Doc Searls has tracked since Business Week asked what the daily paper of tomorrow looks like at the end of 2005, followed by Slate's early-2006 column on blogging. Kessler's angle — that both paper and reader time are scarce resources — gives the optimists a scarcity-economics frame rather than a nostalgia one.
First-order effects
- Readers hitting the Journal's paywall can read the whole op-ed free on Kessler's own blog, a workaround Doc Searls explicitly endorses — extending the piece's reach beyond WSJ subscribers.
Second-order effects
- When authors self-syndicate paywalled work, the wall's value erodes at the margin, pressuring publishers to decide whether bylines or archives are the product they're selling.
Third-order effects
- If the scarcity-of-time argument holds, newspaper strategy shifts from defending print circulation toward owning the filtered, trustworthy summary readers will pay for regardless of substrate.
The trend: Newspaper-future commentary is moving from print-economics obituaries toward scarcity arguments — attention and trust, not newsprint, as the binding constraint — just as ownership fights like Murdoch's Dow Jones bid force the question commercially.