Newspapers and automakers

And from TIME, here's another take on media challenges, with an interesting comparison to the automotive industry. Highlights:

Now, those of you working for car-parts suppliers (or those of you laid off by them) can be excused if you don't break out your tiny violins out of pity for journalists. Where all this becomes your problem is that the daisy chain of free info--the Drudge links, the news crawls, the text updates--ultimately leads back to a professional journalist, somewhere, getting paid to learn stuff. And right now, he or she is weighing job opportunities in telemarketing. ...

Like the car companies, individual media outlets will probably have to learn to be smaller. And they'll need to see their new-media "problems" as part of the solution. Internet users don't hate the media. In fact, when given the tools by something like Twitter or YouTube, they want to be the media. People want the vetted information the news media offer--and they want to riff on it, respond to it and even, as in Mumbai, add to it. Journalists should embrace that rather than futilely fight it.
This means offering users more ways of interacting, commenting and contributing. It means seeing new media not as the dumbing down of civilization but as a new way of telling stories and even finding stories. And it means recognizing that the audience is no longer passive--it wants and expects to participate, even as it wants help in making sense of the info deluge.