DAN

“We decided to prioritize digital over everything else. We were no longer going to be ‘The Atlantic, which happens to do digital.’ We were going to be a digital media company that also published The Atlantic magazine.”

That must have been a frightening prospect for a number of people, I suggested in a conversation with Smith at The Atlantic‘s offices last month.

“It’s easier to be ‘digital first’ when your legacy business is not strong, when you have nothing to defend,” Smith explained. “At the time, all we had to defend was red ink.”

This is a terrifying prospect, but I understand its implications. Building a digital media company is so very difficult when you have a thriving print media company. This piece on Mashable is a great read.

That race, however torturous, has been run in the arena of slow economic growth. If, in fact, we do dip or tumble head over heels into another recession, all bets are off. The wheels may come off the wobbling [newspaper] industry.

I just don't understand why all analysis of the "newspaper industry" (such as the clip of the above piece posted on Niemanlab.org) is tightly focused on the big newspaper companies. So much of what's really working in the business is getting ignored. Also, for some reason the trend is to examine a newspaper company's "success" in the digital space to forecast whether it will be successful.

Many newspaper companies are still doing just fine - indeed thriving - in the print space alone.

"If I had known what I know now, I would have pushed harder against" the Murdoch bid, said Christopher Bancroft, a member of the family which controlled Dow Jones & Company, publishers of The Wall Street Journal.

The reason, I'm sure, it took Mr. Bancroft four years to regret this 2007 decision is because that's exactly how long it took his family to finish counting the $1.2 billion they made from the sale — which is less than half the write down Murdoch had to take just 14 months after the deal closed.

I believe the saying goes, "You can't go broke taking a profit." If the Bancrofts are really concerned about good journalism, maybe they should start another news organization. I know where they should be able to get $1.2 billion in seed money.

Which is why it’s time for journalists to come back to Earth. We need to remember our anchors: why we are in this business, who we are, what our mission is. We’re preoccupied with conveyances instead of with good journalism. Does a story “go viral” because of the transmitting technology? No, it goes viral because it’s an insightful, groundbreaking story. The great thing about the new technologies is that a good story will always find its audience.

The new ombudsman at The Washington Post, Patrick Pexton, articulates well the value of journalism and journalists.