NP: Robyn Hitchcock, I Often Dream of Trains

I thought Phil Bronstein said something interesting the other night on the Colbert Report. He pointed out that, for the newspaper industry to survive, they may have to come to terms with the fact that the "paper" part is not really an integral part of what they do. It's about the content, that being the news. So this growing effort from AOL is starting to look interesting. Of course, it comes on the heels of entities like Politico and Talking Points Memo, but the outlines may be coming into focus on how post-paper news and investigative journalism might work.

Bronstein also compared it to the music business, and he's absolutely right. The biggest problem with the music business is that it was actually the record business, and the difficult transformation has been the paradigm shift of selling pieces of plastic to just selling music (or selling artists, if you consider things like this new Google-backed video venture that aggregates interviews and concert footage and whatnot). I still don't think they've fully come to terms with that, although the last year has shown much greater progress.

The point being, if you were to unhook the actual generation of news content from the distribution of that content, there might be more creative ways to build business models that could work. I'm not saying it's the answer, but it's a direction, and a direction beats flailing helplessly.

UPDATE: At first, I thought Mark Cuban was calling me (not me, specifically) an idiot, but he's not saying that music and news are dissimilar, he's saying that video isn't like either of them. His explanations of the problems in music and news actually echo what I've said here, I think.