For my class on entrepreneurial journalism at the UBC j-school, I draw on the ideas of disruptive innovation of Clayton Christensen of the Harvard Business School. Christensen argues that incumbents tend to focus on sustaining innovations, making small improvements to existing products. What large incumbents struggle with is disruptive innovations – newer and less expensive products that may initially not be as good as the existing one. Christensen outlined the lessons

This promotional video for the journalism school at Conestogac College in Ontario is a revelation. Lots of talk about print and producing a newspaper but no mention of this new-fangled thing called the interweb. Oh well, journalists don’t need to know about the Internet and how it is changing the profession. As Howard Owens commented, “It must still be 1988 in Canada.&#

There already has been much discussion online about the piece in the New York Times on woes facing the newspaper business. It paints a gloomy picture about the future of print, with a litany of layoffs, buyouts, and declining revenues. None of this is new news. As Dan Kennedy points out, “the news business has been through several paradigm shifts since taking on a form we’d recognize beginning in the

More nonsense about blogs, this time from the former editor of The Times, Simon Jenkins. According to Jenkins, a newspaper column is like writing “a collected essay”, while blogging is like “laying down your pen, going to the pub and telling the guy next to you what you really think”. And if that weren’t bad enough, Jenkins continues digging: It’s the difference between writing and a bar room chat, which

NewWest.net‘s founder, Jonathan Weber, makes a compelling argument about the longevity of print. At first, this seems odd, coming from one of the people behind the Rocky Mountain community news site. But like he says, revenues from print still outweigh those from online, and this is one of the reasons why NewWest.net is launching a print magazine. Yes, we can all agree that print is in a slow decline. But,