Law 1 – In the Age Darwinian Content, We’re Becoming Our Own and Each Other’s Editors

Conventional Wisdom #1) Readers won’t pay for non-business content. Yes, we know that readers will pay for the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, and that Consumer Reports, which helps us save money, counts more digital subs than anyone else. While some smaller dailies have begun to poke around the edges of digital reader content, Exhibit A will be the New York Times, with its new metered payment system to launch early in the year. If the Times can claim one to two percent of 30 million or so uniques (its internal count) — or 300,000 to 600,000 paying customers — that’ll be a major milestone.

News Anywhere, or unified news, or All-Access, whatever we want to call it, demands the singular focus, product development and messaging that Netflix, HBO, Comcast, and Facebook are bringing to it. Those are all skills that have been problematic in the news industry. Yet, here we are, in a new age, in a mobile news age about to unfold, giving the journalism, and journalists, another chance to get it right.

In fact, Kindle Singles may open the door even further to wider news business application, for news companies — old and new, publicly funded and profit-seeking, text-based and video-oriented. It takes the old 78s and 33 1/3s, and opens a world of 45s, mixes, and infinite remixes. It says: You know what a book is, right? Think again. It can also say: You know what a newspaper is, right? Think again. While the Kindle Singles notion itself seems to have its limits — it’s text and fixed in time, not updatable on the fly — it springs loose the wider idea of publishing all kinds of new news and newsy content in new containers. Amazon is trying to define this strange new middle, with the Kindle Singles nomenclature, while some have used the term “chapbook” to describe it. We’ve got to wonder what Apple is thinking in response — what’s an app in Kindle Singles world? What’s a Kindle Single in an apps world? It’s not a book, an article, a newspaper, or a magazine, but something new. We now get to define that something new, both in name, but most importantly in content possibility.

The conventional wisdom (to borrow an old phrase iconized by Newsweek): weekly reading bio-rhythms are dead; it’s a 24-/7 news world and let’s get on with it. One problem: the human brain.

Young Otis Chandler — generation six of the family that built the Times into one of America’s great papers — talked about his four-year Goodreads, a social book review site that has grown to 1.7 million unique visitors a month, a 65% jump from a year ago. So if young Otis has modernized the book section, what other traditional newspaper section are ripe for digital modernization?