Online News Squared ™

Provocative post from Jeff Jarvis on BuzzMachine today, suggesting that newspapers get the heck out of the digital publishing business. (Jeff has long advocated outsourcing print production, too). Edward Roussel of the Telegraph put the bug in his ear, including a suggestion for likely technology host for a common industry platform: Google.

“Edward reasoned that Google already is the key distributor online. He said that Google is great at technology and newspapers aren’t and for the future, where are the best technologists going to go? Google. Google is also brilliant at selling ads and Edward even wondered where the best sales talent would go in the future: there or a paper? So why not hand over those segments of the business to Google and concentrate on what a newspaper should do: journalism?”

Bob Wyman of Google tells Jarvis “Your IT infrastructure is a COST of doing business. It is not a thing of value” and posits:

“Today’s newspapers invest in their web sites out of vanity and from an inability to get their heads out of the geographically defined markets of the past. They have a “local paper” so they assume they need a “local site.” Bull. Developing and maintaining a web site is expensive and reduces the funds available to support the journalism and community building. All but the largest papers should be sharing their websites, computer technology, etc. If you think you need SQL and HTML people on full-time staff, then you’re probably not understanding what it will take it succeed in the future.”

Jarvis recounts a newsroom CMS “disaster” at the Chicago Tribune as he was leaving years ago (“the company dispatched its own vaunted Task Force investigative journalists to probe the failure”) as an example of why it’s time to focus just on content, not manufacturing and distribution and platforms and hardware.

“So take the advice, papers: Get out of the manufacturing and distribution and technology businesses as soon as possible. Turn off the press. Outsource the computers. Outsource the copyediting to India or to the readers. Collaborate with the reporting public. And then ask what you really are. The answer matters dearly.”