As things change...

... winners will adapt and change also. Continuing to blame others, bury heads in deep sand, or continue down the path as though nothing has really changed at all are recipes for disaster. Though this article nails what is happening in the newspaper industry, it is probably happening in your industry as well.

With exceptions such as China and India, the (slow) decline of the newspaper business is a worldwide trend. The big mistake that newspapers in America, Europe and Latin America have made in response to the new environment is to treat this trend as a financial and a technological challenge rather than a cultural phenomenon.

The newspaper industry's response over the past decade -- and Knight-Ridder is a good example, but not the only one -- has consisted mainly of two things: restructuring finances and providing online versions of print products. Everything else -- including the creation of new businesses under their famed brands or going into cable TV -- was intended to salvage the traditional way of providing news. The result is, well, the "whodunit" yell.

The cultural change taking place with regard to information amounts to a decentralization of power. Steve Greenhut of The Orange County Register in Southern California put it nicely when he wrote that "this is the equivalent of the Protestant Reformation for the media, where every man can become his own pope, or in this case his own publisher.''