Risky Business

When is the best time to take a risk? When you have nothing to lose.

What industries should be taking the biggest risks?

1. Auto companies - Is the Volt risky enough for General Motors or will it be one of a dozen other similar cars? American car companies are on the road to ruin so they need to make the best electric car possible. Is Tesla Motors for sale?

2. Newspapers - When will one newspaper decide to stop printing a newspaper and go completely online? Sure, they won't make the same revenue--but they won't have the same expenses either. If a newspaper waits until their print readership is down so low that they are debating about going out of business then it is too late. By then they'll have lost readership and have probably carved up their newsroom so much that they won't really be a news source. Thus death is imminent.

3. Oil companies - This sounds crazy, but who has more money right now with a worse public image? The writing is on the wall--Americans want to stop using oil. If I'm running a big oil company then I wake-up every day trying to be at the forefront of alternative fuels. Remember, the General Motors and New York Times of the world never saw it coming even while the writing was on the wall.

4. Barack Obama - McCain has been playing it risky and that is the only reason he's still relavent in this race. Obama has to stop trying so hard to be perfect and take McCain on in the next debate like a man whose family is starving. Playing for a tie might get him through the debate and it could make him President but it may also find him still in the Senate come January.

I read the news today oh boy...

Why are newspapers going out of business? Because they always seem to be years behind everyone else.

If I ran one of the major newspaper companies like New York Times, Hearst, McClatchey, MediaNews Group, Lee, etc. I wouldn't operate out of fear or be reactive--I'd be proactive. At this point what do newspapers have to lose? They are already losing.

There are no instant fixes for newspapers but here are a few thoughts:

1. Newspapers won't print on paper forever. Why aren't these newspaper companies coming together and investing in companies like Amazon, which owns the Kindle, or investing in epaper? It would save them billions of dollars a year by not printing on paper and the cost of investing in this future technology wouldn't cost anywhere near that. Even better, give the new epaper product to current and future subscribers. You'd still be saving money as a collection of papers and probably find the one thing newspapers can't find now: new subscribers. Just sign them up for a 3 year subscription in return they get the epaper reader.

2. Why do newspapers concede ownership of news aggregation to the likes of Yahoo, Google, MSN, AOL, Digg, etc? I'd create a newspaper coalition and buy or build a portal property and become the owner of my own destiny rather than hoping that your story gets picked up and you get Dugg. Within that newspaper portal I'd create the best news search engine.

3. Build better classifieds. Video, audio, and more. Craigslist is the minimalist's answer to classifieds so make them better. Not just better, make them great. Then, print the classifieds. Craig can't do that.

4. Create a newspaper site that allows the users to build their own section. If I like crafts then let me build a crafts section. Even more niche would be a sewing section under crafts. Let the user build the section and we'll filter the stories from around the world of interest to people who sew. It's not impossible to build niche sections--Ebay does it. Newspapers need to stop deciding what people want and let them show us.

The real losers in the presidential campaigns

And the winner(loser) is: the press. Rumors swirling about Palin, Obama and McCain. What is the truth? Well it used to be that the press set us straight. But now who knows. There are some newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post that have tried to set the record straight, even if they lean in a certain direction, so who is giving us the unbiased information here?

Local papers don't have the resources to give us all the details but they should and could work with the larger papers to have a running ticker of what is true and what is false. Also, let us know which candidate is promising what is being promised and which of those promises simply won't work. Everyone promises, but we all know not everything can be delivered on.

In a time when newspapers are seen nationally as losing credibility this is a time when they could help rescue their readers from making uninformed decisions. Otherwise the true losers are the citizens of this country.