Facilitate the flow of information to the point of its highest value.

The media industry at large has lost its path. Most media companies are heavily tilted toward media as entertainment, rather than media as information. As a result, they are engaged in a digital race to the bottom, where falling ad CPM drives them to seek higher page view numbers on thinner margins, focusing on quantity rather than quality, on usage rather than utility. This has left a huge, blue ocean of market opportunities in focused information services open to software and technology companies, who are growing at exponential rates while traditional media companies struggle to slow the rate at which their business is shrinking. Media businesses can stop drowning and start growing again if they recognize and adopt the mission statement above, the mission that media organizations have always had.

As a media organization, your mission is to facilitate the flow of information to the point of its highest value.

That doesn’t just mean its highest value to you, the business, but the highest value over all to the community you serve. Journalism can be seen as a fulfillment of this mission, because information about corporate malfeasance …

When I hear newspaper industry veterans talk about getting paid for content, it makes me want to cry. Case in point, this speech from Bill Monroe to the Midwest Newspaper Summit in Des Moines, Iowa, given Feb. 4, 2010.

What’s missing in today’s marketplace is a way to enable newspapers to protect that content and to profit when others reuse it. – Bill Monroe

I’m sorry Mr. Monroe, but I must disagree quite strongly. The reason journalism should be free is that journalism is extremely valuable. Sound counter-intuitive? Not at all.

Your newspaper is Seth Godin's Meatball Sundae — full of valuable stuff, but not a product anyone wants to buy.

I hear the same sentiment from executives all over the media industry, and especially from newspapers. “We deserve to get paid for our content.”

Dear Media Executives: You’re doing it wrong!

Last week, the New York Times announced plans to start charging certain readers for access to their web site. Reaction was predictable: Jeff Jarvis complained, TechCrunch ran some numbers, and Mashable used it as an excuse to talk about a rumored but still unannounced Apple product (seriously Mashable? come on).

One business model for online news that has been suggested, tried, and failed, is to make the news free for some short time, and then archive it behind a pay-wall. There is more than one reason why this doesn’t work as a business model, but the most obvious one is an old adage that should have been well known in the newspaper industry: yesterday’s news wraps today’s fish.

"Help me, Obi-wan Tablet. You're my only hope!" says old media. But these are not the droids they are looking for.

There has been so much hand waving in the last month about 2010 being “the year of the tablet”, it boggles the mind. Much of the buzz has centered around the anticipated announcement of a tablet device by Apple, makers of the much-admired iPhone. However, media industry wonks are all abuzz about how the new platform will redefine newspapers, magazines, and other print products.

Every media business is built around at least one of three key content activities: creation of content, curation of content, and compilation of data into content. Many media businesses, especially the large ones, make all three of these activities core competencies. Which sounds most like your business?

Many still doubt the utility of social media. I myself was among the doubters until I was forced onto Twitter and Facebook to test the social media integration for a web site I was developing. That’s when I discovered that, although Sturgeon’s Law applies to social media as much as anything else, the small percentage of “good stuff” is exceedingly valuable.

Case in point is this article: In a pinch, Twitter found a long shot source | By Daniel Victor. Stuck playing catch up on a story on a Sunday evening, with deadline looming, journalist Daniel Victor turned to Twitter in a last ditch search for sources. Long story short, Twitter came through for him.

The value of social networking tools like Twitter and Facebook is not immediately obvious to some (it wasn’t to me), and may even be counter intuitive. I’ve heard complaints that it’s difficult or impossible to form deep relationships through digital media, and Luddite sentiment that we should turn back to “face time” in our relationships. I disagree with the idea that deep relationships cannot be formed online, but the real value of social media is not in the deep relationships. It’s in the weak …

Time was, newspapers owned the local classified ads business, and it was their cash cow. Many people bought the paper just for the classifieds, and it was by far the most valuable real estate of the paper. In recent years, free Internet- based alternatives like Craig’s List decimated their business and contributed greatly to the decline of newspapers.