Vin Crosbie recently attended the second phase of Newspaper Next, an initiative by the American Press Institute and innovation consulting firm Innosight, designed to bring together decision-makers in the American newspaper industry to discuss new ways to transform that industry.

What Vin took away from that session, however, left him with the impression that this think-tank is in a "time warp". Breaking down Innosight's two-part strategy for how the newspaper industry should tackle the troubles ahead: "Innosight’s first suggestion was that the newspaper industry defend itself by utilizing a process in which it stops seeing its purposes as selling a printed product and instead look at how people ‘hire’ newspapers to do various 'jobs'"

This particular strategy was described with a fast-food analog gleaned from Innosight research. Innosight found that, at fast food restaurants, consumers "hire" milkshakes to do one of two specific jobs: either sustain them through long commutes or to please their children. It was then suggested that newspapers think about the "jobs" that consumers might "hire" a newspaper to perform and develop their products to serve those "jobs."

Innosight's second suggestion, Vin notes, "was that newspapers stop worrying about developing ‘perfect’ quality services or those backed by financially perfect financial projections; stop worrying about whether new services will fail; and stop taking years of internal reviews before launching such services. Newspapers instead should quickly launch new ‘good enough’ services on the cheap. As these services start to succeed or fail, the newspapers should quickly refine, revise, or discard the services. In other words, newspapers should emulate the start-up companies that are launching innovative and cheap new products or services against them."

Further, Vin observes that Innosight's were, for the most part, outdated: "The advice Innosight gave would have been excellent advice for the newspaper industry in 1995, shortly after newspapers first began publishing online, before their printed product’s circulations began precipitous drops, and before the newspapers’ businesses began being eaten by small and then unknown competitors whose innovative and cheap new products and services newspapers initially ignored as flawed or not lucrative enough -- new competitors named Google, Yahoo!, craigslist, etc. Innosight’s advice has come ten years too late."

Editor and Publisher reviews statements made by Wall Street Journal Publisher L. Gordon Crovitz at the Inter American Press Association (IAPA) seminar Saturday in Mexico City about the changes the Journal will introduce in its January2, 2007 edition. "Our goal is keeping a business model in order to maintain news departments that are as large as they have been, and that maintain the lifestyles of the people in those large newsrooms," said Crovitz.

Crovitz has listened to the Journal's core readers, C-level executives, and understands that many have become adopters of new technology. These executives told Journal researchers they wanted an online product that interfaced better with the print product, and with type that was "easier to read." One major update will be to the pages of detailed financial listings, which will be replaced by what Crovitz describes as "a state-of-the-art" Markets Data Center.

The speed at which the Journal will innovate, however, will be markedly different than in the past: "The product lifespan of that newspaper was 50 years," Crovitz said. "The product span of this Journal is not going to be 50 years. It´s not going to be 10 years. It'll be closer to 5, or maybe closer to 2 or 3."