The Future Of Newspaper Publishers (Embrace The Working-Time Activity)

[tweetmeme source=”jonashuckestein” only_single=false]Since some people have been complaining that this has become a nerd’s blog, I thought I’d also share something else I think about from time to time.

There seems to be a discussion going on about how newspapers can maintain their business model in the connected world we live in. They are suddenly competing in a global market in which the consumers spend little more than one minute reading news and expect that to be free. A couple of weeks ago Google Chief Economist Hal Varian held an interesting presentation at UC Berkeley. According to him, the decline in newspaper revenue is caused primarily because reading news has shifted from a leisure-time activity to a working-time activity. Thus, the goal must be to reinstate news as a leisure time activity. (Let’s call that the “iPad-approach”)

I disagree. The internet enabled news to become a working-time activity, but it is not responsible for the decline in leisure-time newspaper reading. In fact, according to Varian, the number of per capita newspaper subscriptions has seen a steady decline since the 50s that has only ever so slightly accelerated in the last couple of years.

So here’s a (difficult) question: How can newspaper publishers embrace their working-time-ness?