What newsrooms should learn from Kodak

Steve Yelvington reporting: Your business isn't what you think it is. Kodak at its peak looked like a photography company, but it was really a giant chemical manufacturing company. Digital tech rendered the entire chemical photography business irrelevant. By comparison, newspapers looked like news and information companies, but they were really expensive commercial advertisement printing and delivery systems. If you have borrowed heavily to build and maintain capital-intensive processes that are suddenly rendered irrelevant, you're in deep trouble no matter how smart you are and no matter what you do. Printing isn't yet irrelevant, but it's trending that way. This is not to the time to invest in a new three-around compact press line.
... Brands decay. When I started in photography, Kodak was the trusted source. (Sound familiar, newspaper people?) We might flirt with funky European Agfa and exotic Asian Fuji, but when it was time to get serious, it was Kodak Tri-X and Kodak paper and Kodak Dektol. In a digital world, Kodak's brand means little. And if you think your newspaper's brand is a huge asset, you probably need to get out and talk to some young people now and then.
...All of this may seem like a downer, but it doesn't need to be. If you clear out the assumptions, what's left may be easier to understand. Businesses still need convey offers to consumers, and if anything, digital technology has chopped the audience up in to little pieces and distributed it all over the universe. Pulling audiences back together creates value. Make that your goal, and don't let up for a second.
http://www.yelvington.com/content/what-newsrooms-should-learn-kodak