Newspaper Publishers Need to Learn to Think Like GIS Professionals

Do newspaper's understand their own business? I think not. Look around in the media today and you will see lots of articles describing a failing newspaper industry. TIME Magazine summarised the current newspaper environment saying, "Business schools teach that CEOs are charged with looking at a company's future so that they can think strategically about how to position their firms for the world as it will be in five or ten years." True.  That being the case, there are many CEO's who simply missed the boat in reading the future. But the battles are now moving from the newsroom's to the streets if the comments in stories are any indication.

Even in 2001 few newspaper companies were willing to embrace  new technology and change, though they recognised it. In an article entitled "Daily newspaper journalists in the 1990s" at BNET, it was noted that, "In 1982 the estimate was 51,650 full-time daily newspaper journalists. In 1992, the American Society of Newspaper Editors estimated 54,500, a growth of nearly 3,000 over the decade, compared with a growth of nearly 13,000 during the 1970s (from 38,800 to 51,650)." Clearly the market was slowing 20 year's ago, resulting in a declining need for more journalists.

The article "Who Put These Guys In Charge? (Why Newspapers Are Failing)" by Douglas McLennan aptly describe's that readership has in fact increased, substantially, but the problem lies in the fact that newspapers have not been alert enough to where and how it has.  The Associated Press last week pointed it's finger at Google News, citing the fact that it wanted people (Google) to pay up for using it's content, and presumeably others. Yet another example of fighting rather than adapting?

I think a high quality, free press is an integral part of a democratic society. I would like to see high quality news flourish, grow and expand, rather than simply become a regurgitated bunch of wire stories dumped into search engines and grinded together and pushed out the other side. Like high quality geodata, high quality news comes with a price. It also entails an awareness of changes.

Newspapers are stuck on 'newness' - it is not news unless it is distributed before being barely written. Social media is probably contributing to this because of it's sense of urgency to perform n-o-w.

Newspaper publishers ought to think like GIS professionals.

Most newspapers are sitting on a pile of extremely valuable, and useful information - their records.

All the many years of professionally gathered and written material is a veritable gold mine. But for agencies who are attached to the here and now (i.e. N-e-w-s) then it is kind of like being unable to see the forest for the trees.

Ask any map or GIS professional handling spatial data, cadastral, thematic, environmental or otherwise, and they will immediately point to the value of databases and records. This is how old and new information is analyzed and compared and used to build the future, be it land management, transport systems or crime behaviour.

Newspapers appear stuck on 'the news' - and are missing the change over time angle of generating new information, creating new knowledge. Their databases and records far exceed others in value.

Rather than absorbing your news in bits and bites you forget in two hours, wouldn't you rather have it oriented to the past, sideways and longitudinally, mined and analysed and placed into a context that links to the best new technology for representing it and meeting people's needs?

I know I would.

[Add. April 17 - 09] When mentioning geographic information systems (GIS) I am thinking not only of maps for articles, but the actual spatial relationships of information news in a temporal way. If you look at News today you will see 'recent articles' referencing to existing content. This is a step in a rudimentary way but doesn't do much more then turn attention to elsewhere. It is the synthesis of these pieces that extracts the value.  Look to the geospatial intelligence community to understand this principle better.

[Add. Apr 18 - 09] Der Spiegel - Hard Times for a German News Wire

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