Jarvis to the Newspaper Industry: You Blew It

Been following Jeff Jarvis at Buzzmachine for some time and he wrote a speech he wished would be delivered to the Newspaper Association of America at this week’s meeting and delivered it with with one key theme: you blew it.

He starts off with this:

You’ve had 20 years since the start of the web, 15 years since the creation of the commercial browser and craigslist, a decade since the birth of blogs and Google to understand the changes in the media economy and the new behaviors of the next generation of – as you call them, Mr. Murdoch – net natives. You’ve had all that time to reinvent your products, services, and organizations for this new world, to take advantage of new opportunities and efficiencies, to retrain not only your staff but your readers and advertisers, to use the power of your megaphones while you still had it to build what would come next. But you didn’t.

You blew it.

This is worth a read if you care at all about strong journalism and, especially, investigative journalism. Unless you’re a fascist, of course, and would really love to have a weak media filled with easily intimated bloggers (all with day jobs) so you could push your agenda with no one calling you out on it. Nicely done Brother Jarvis.