Can Newspapers reinvent themselves and come back to their past glory?

Can Newspapers reinvent themselves and come back to their past glory? Some will some will not depends on if they can change their old self.

I recently attended NAA Mediaxchange2009 and you could see the newspaper industry is in trouble including NAA. They are still teaching people they need to do SEO, change websites make them interactive by adding Videos etc, I think they need to take a long leap to present world of facebooks, myspaces, etc. Like it happended in Asia they are way ahead of West in Cellphone content, technology, communication because Asia missed the boat of high speed internet. They need to accept Newspapers have missed the boat and they need a "Giant Leap" to survive and do something interesting and have every opportunity to be the next big thing.

Local is still not captured by anyone, they ahve the opportunity to get their market back from yellopages, other content sites, local advertising, local news, local communities. They need to redefine themselves, rediscover themselves, they need to get some young blood who live and breathe in the twitter, apple, myspace, second life world. They have local content, they ahve local businesses talking to them, they have access to schools, universities. They have it all for all age groups they need to take next steps not just next steps next, next , next ......... steps and run instead of crawling. If they are afraid do like some newspapers are doing now, Greenspun Media excellent excellent stuff, they are on the right track, Gazette with Chuck Peters. Lets motivate each other and go without looking back.

I think NAA needs to take these steps as well as they represent the industry and if they are slow the industry will die a bad and painfull death.

Next Big Thing

Most of companies today are trying to figure out what is the next big thing and what the users want. They get too sucked up in the debate of what features people want with user studies, research data from Nielsons, comscore etc, focussed groups and what not. They forget users are very sophisticated these days and to predict what features they are going to like or not is very hard if not impossible to predict. So why go that way, if you have an idea and with all the strategies, market trends, and belief you have about your idea to be the next big thing than build it in a way that you create a platform which motivates people to contribute and take it to the next level.

Future is all about users, if you cannot motivate them to try it out and get connected, than it will be very hard to create the next big thing. Google did that with with their search which motivated website owners to spend so much time with their website that they created a multi billion dollar industry of SEO. Facebook did with providing the freedom to users to create their community, this is not the first time its been done, forums have been in existence from they day internet was invented but what they did was motivated people, businesses to create new tools and communication channels. Myspace did it in the same way, their have been many sites which did similar things before fortunecity, geocities but there platforms were limited and control freak, lost focus on the development in technology to motivate people to contribute.

Well I can say these platforms have changed the defination of open source, even though these new platforms are not open source but their inspiration is definetly from the open source platform by opening up their platforms with API's.