Health system CEOs would be well advised to study what newspaper industry leaders did (or perhaps more appropriately, didn’t do) when faced with a dramatic industry change. Turn back the clock 15 years and the following dynamics were present:
- Newspaper leaders knew full well that dramatic change was underway and even made some tactical investments. However they didn’t fundamentally rethink their model.
- Newspapers were comfortable as monopoly or oligopoly businesses allowing for plodding decisions. Their IT infrastructure mirrored the plodding pace with expensive and rigid technology architectures.
- Newspaper companies bought up other newspaper chains and took on huge debt.
- Owning printing presses was a de facto barrier to entry allowing newspapers unfettered dominance.
- Depending on one’s perspective, it was the best of times or the worst of times to be a leader of local media enterprise.
Before they knew it, owning massive capital assets and the accompanying crushing debt became unsustainable. The capital barrier to entry transformed into a boat anchor while nimble competition dismissed as ankle-biters created a death-by-a-thousand-paper-cuts dynamic. Competitively, newspaper companies worried only about other media companies or even Microsoft, but their undoing was driven by a combination of craigslist, monster.com, cars.com, eBay, and countless other marketing substitutes for their advertisers. In addition, there were easier ways to get news than newspapers. Generally, the newspaper’s digital groups were either marginalized or unbearably shackled so that the encumbered digital leaders left to join more aggressive competitors. The enabling technology to reinvent local media didn’t come from legacy IT vendors who’d long sold to newspaper companies, but from “no name” technologies such as WordPress, Drupal and the like.
