Digital media consultant Judy Sims ignited debate in the journalism community recently with her blog post, “Top 10 Lies Newspaper Execs are Telling Themselves.”
Sims takes an unflinching look at the biggest dilemmas facing the print media industry, and dissects them one-by-one. The abridged list:
Lie #1: We can manage this disruption from within an integrated organization.
Lie #2: Print advertising reps can sell online ads too
Lie #3: Aggregators are killing my business
Lie #4: We can re-create scarcity by putting up pay walls
Lie #5: Our readers paid for news in the past, they will again
Lie #6: There will never be enough online revenue to support our newsroom
Lie #7: No one will ever cover crime/health/city hall the way we do
Lie #8: Our readers can’t be trusted/they are idiots/they are assholes
Lie #9 Democracy will collapse without us
Lie #10: I can compete with the best digital leaders/thinkers/creators in the world without becoming an active member of the online community.
We identify most with Lie #3: Aggregators are killing my business. Sims’ tough-love wake-up call refutes the fallacy, and singles out Daylife as the aggregator that newspapers like. Sims writes :
No they’re not.
This one drives me nuts. Don’t blame Arianna, Tina, Larry and Sergey or all those Tweeple out there. If anyone killed the newspaper business as we knew it, it was Craig Newmark.
People making this argument always forget that newspapers can be aggregators too. As I asked earlier this week, why is there no HuffPo equivalent in the UK?
You don’t even need humans to do the aggregation. Daylife, Evri, Inform et al will do it for you and in the case of Daylife in particular, brilliantly.
We’re humbled by the accolades. But we hope Sims knows that Daylife also allows for hand-picked curation of content, through products like Daylife Select and features like Editor’s Picks. It’s part of how Daylife gives publishers a complete toolkit for curating and aggregating the highest quality content on the web.
