Zell Doesn’t Have to Lose His Shirt

Sam Zell has managed to buy The Tribune Co., and Doc Searls reports he plans to quickly destroy it.

He will do so due to a basic misunderstanding. He claims Tribune has been "giving itself away" to Google for too long and he can do something about it. (The picture is from the Kellogg School at Northwestern. Sometimes I very much wish I’d taken the hint at my first Journalism lecture there and gone to Kellogg instead of Medill.)

The statement is false. Google has taken nothing from The Tribune Co. It has just linked to its pages, enabling readers to find stories quickly, and place the paper’s coverage on a level playing field with that of everyone else.

In fact the Tribune has been fighting the Web, in fits and starts, ever since it was spun. It’s tried forced registration, it’s tried special Web-only content. Nothing has worked.

Here is the problem.  While newspapers claim to be advocates for their readers, in a business sense they are always agents for sellers, not buyers. This is why they have failed. The Web turns this supply-demand equation on its head. There is no shortage of content, no shortage of sellers, online. The shortage is of buyers.

So don’t just create content. Be a database.

How could newspapers take advantage of this fact and become relevant again? Not by attacking Google. It would be by using Google to gain more page views.

Newspapers are ignoring half of journalism’s definition. Journalism means organizing and advocating on behalf of a place, a group or an industry.

Newspapers, in other words, aren’t organizing.

If I had Sam Zell before me right now I would sell one piece of advice. Become a city directory. That may mean buying another company, either a phone directory or old-fashioned city directory, for its database.

Once you have this data on every business, every institution, and every
family in the region, you link your morgue to it. You provide these
businesses with free tools which let them connect the morgue’s data to
landing pages. The pages will exist by default, but you register their
owners (perhaps for a small fee in the case of businesses) and let them
provide links from everything the paper has ever written about them.
You let restaurants add menus, you let law firms add information on
their lawyers’ specialties, you give every school and organization its
own home page.

Then you sell relevant advertising on these pages. The fee you collect
from businesses is in lieu of these ads. They mean that the business is
advertising for itself.

Then you integrate all this with what Google does. When someone enters
an address into Google Maps, you want them to find your directory entry
on the business in question on the first page. Enter the business’
name, same thing. You link the pages you’ve created on each business to
automated Google searches, so that when people hit the landing page
they not only see the ad, and everything The Tribune has written, but
every other news story on the company, every blog post.

Google will like this. Google will support this. Google is in the
business of helping people find stuff, and if you aggregate what can be
found, you give Google users one-stop shopping.

This is true for everyone. You become a Web success by becoming
Google’s friend. Not its enemy. And if The Tribune should fail, you now
know how to build the firm which will replace it.