In doing so, you imply that the papers were unwilling to embrace “progress” and change with the times (and that hot type was what you call “The Business Model”).
When, in fact, they were only too willing to move to cold type when they saw how much money they could save in personnel costs.
But I don’t want to reuse my electronic device after it has lined the birdcage.
Derleth: Thanks for that listing; as I was going through it, I was thinking more of IBM than newspapers, but then I saw you also mentioned IBM (and DEC and Microsoft). Lots of industries could be listed there: railroads, radio and TV broadcasters, movie studios, etc. When will anyone learn?
Anyway, I subscribe to three papers: 1) my local city paper, which has never published a Sunday edition since we’re too close to Minneapolis and the Sunday Star-Tribune monopolizes Sunday sales; 2) the aforementioned Sunday Star-Tribune, for more state-wide news and longer articles and opinions; and 3) my hometown weekly paper, half of which is legal notices.
The local paper has gone from six-days a week to five, dropping the Friday edition. I keep it for local news, obituaries (of course!), the comics and puzzles, and upcoming events. They have some quite good local columnists as well. I thought they were doing a good job until dropping the Friday edition showed they’re under some financial stress.
No: For papers, The Business Model is printing news with ads (or ads with news, if you’re being more pedantic about things) and selling the resulting pieces of paper. Cold type versus hot type versus xerography makes no odds as regards that, and, indeed, those kinds of technological advance are freely adopted as they make The Business Model more efficient, without disrupting it.
As another example, IBM’s original Business Model (and, to some extent, its current business model) was supplying calculating and organizing hardware to organizations. This goes back to pre-computer tabulation machines; in a very direct sense, the move from that technology to computers wasn’t disruptive for IBM, so it could be adopted without risk. The later move from vacuum tubes to discrete transistors to integrated circuits was similarly non-disruptive, as all those technologies can be used to make large computers (and smaller computers kept carefully less powerful than the large computers) more efficient and more reliable.
IBM had problems when it turned out that discrete transistors could also be used to make smaller, cheaper computers which could compete with their more expensive offerings, which is the market niche DEC made its bones in: The PDP-8 was one of the first cheap computers useful to businesses (a minicomputer), and it sold like hotcakes. Then ICs disrupted DEC’s business model by making microcomputers which could go head-to-head with more expensive minicomputers, and DEC (by that point Digital) ended up getting bought by Compaq, the clone maker that whipped IBM’s ass by making those disruptively-powerful microcomputers.
So new technology can be adopted in a way congruent with The Business Model, as newspapers hopped from one printing technology to another and IBM and DEC hopped from one CPU manufacturing technology to another. The danger is when that new technology enables an upstart to disrupt The Business Model in a way you can’t match without cannibalizing existing profits, perhaps to the point of destroying short-term profitability, and risking terminally pissing off existing customers.
Babylon 5 had public terminals on the station that printed personalized newspapers on demand.
I have been getting my dad’s subscription to Time for more than a dozen years. They said the subscription could not be canceled because it was made through a 3rd party. I wonder if Time will stop printing before the subscription runs out.