“Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

The words spoken by Michael Caine in The Dark Knight, in description of the Joker’s motivation, are intensely inspirational for me.  Speaking of a jewel thief in Burma, Caine’s Alfred explains that the man was robbing caravans not for the money or the precious stones, but for the thrill.  The rubies and diamonds ended up thrown away, they were meaningless to him, in comparison to the challenge of getting them.

Some men just want to watch the world burn.  For me, this means taking pleasure in disruption.  While I don’t find glee in mayhem, I like tearing down things that don’t work.  I find joy in destroying a failed system and rebuilding.  And for my generation, there are an awful lot of failed systems to see, if you care to look.

Disruption is the most important factor in our changing business world - while everyone wants to blame Google and blogs for the death of the American newspaper, an equal culprit is Craigslist.  Taking the classified ad revenue from the newspaper industry, collapsing it dramatically, and putting it in a much smaller number of pockets, is classic disruption.  Craig Newmark and company sidestepped an existing model, built something simpler and better, and watched the world burn.

Disruption works the way this example suggests; no one was focused on changing the face of journalism.  But the funding model of classified ads had become integral, and unseen, in paying for journalism.  Craigslist built a better user experience, and continues to refine it with glorious simplicity.  Failing newspapers are the precious stones left in the dirt.  Inconsequential.

Real change, lasting change, total overhaul change, doesn’t happen by carefully sticking new parts into an old system.  Sometimes you reach a point where starting over is the only thing left to do.  And to do that, you have to be willing to watch the world burn, for a little bit.  Try not to get scared.

Reminder re: ‘Death’ of Newsmedia

If journalism was even the majority of content making up traditional newsmedia, we’d be in a very different situation.

We’re not talking about the viability of journalism as a product, because the product hasn’t really been journalism for a very, very long time.

Address the Issue.

The problem isn’t that the internet is killing print. Or that the internet is killing attention spans. The issue is that text, in short bursts, reads well online.

And so, instead of producing multiple types of content, newspapers either hid the stories behind a paywall (making them irrelevant) or posted them in full online (making a print purchase seem a little foolish). Does a newspaper website make that print product irrelevant? No. It doesn’t offer the same experience, the same serendipity, that scanning a printed paper does. if it’s 6 screens long, it also doesn’t result is a pile of engaged readers paying attention to ads.

But a newspaper website allows readers to think ‘Why am I paying for this?’ which is the core problem. The actual value proposition of a print newspaper is poorly articulated. If you ignore the pains of reading long form text online, and ignore the actual print experience, reading it on the internet seems like a much better call. A printed newspaper can be read in a unique way, which is very well suited to presenting, well, news.

The internet does short bursts of text well. Video. Audio. Distribution. The assumption that the online presence of a newspaper, or a TV show, or a magazine, should be a flat out reproduction of the core product, is absurd. Create things that add to the core product, expand on it, but don’t replace it.

Paywalls are a half-assed solution to the problem of devaluing content. Consider a web-presence that actually adds value to your physical products, instead.