Vin Crosbie's take on newspaper convergence

Vin Crosbie wrote a fascinating critique last night (at 2am his time, no less - this is the sort of thing that keeps newspaper people up at nights) of the idea of newspaper convergence.

The thinking is similar to his "twins" article from OJR in 2004, in which he pointed out that if one of two conjoined twins dies, the interdependency of the two means that the death of the other cannot be far behind.  Given that newspaper websites take much of their content from and allocate much of their costs to their print operations - as he said in his 2004 article, and reiterated yesterday - the commercial death of a printed newspaper necessarily means the death of any news websites it supports.

There are some possible gaps in the analysis - newsprint, for example, is a substantial and growing cost of doing business for newspapers and in 2005 represented 11% of NYTco's costs. An online-only newgathering operation would eliminate that cost, and the digital equivalents - servers, bandwidth - are getting cheaper (and according to Moore's Law are doing so very rapidly) rather than as with newsprint becoming more expensive.

Jay Smaller comments on Vin's manifesto; "must we live or die by the bundle? I think not. Unbundling and examining each value proposition for its new media potential would be the best way to manage both cost and revenue curves. Jettison those little things a newspaper does because they make sense in the bundle, if they don't make sense apart from it."

Indeed. Newspapers are packages. They bundle together "everything that the reader should want to know on that day" (Vin again, in his 2004 OJR article). Digital is all about unbundling - as iTunes et al shows us, serving the digital consumer is about slicing and dicing the packets that work in a way that serving the pre-digital consumer was not. Newspapers - or at least news organisations - that crack the secret of which elements of the  newspaper package work online as both a popular and commercial proposition should look forward to a future of rude good health.