So, what business are we in?

In the New Yorker, James Surowiecki comments on the rapidly shrinking newspaper readership.  (Yes, the market for my newspaper op-eds is in grave danger, and I am not sure whether anyone cares for my blogs!)  Anyway, in that column, Surowiecki notes that:

Newspaper readership has been slowly dropping for decades—as a percentage of the population, newspapers have about half as many subscribers as they did four decades ago—but the Internet helped turn that slow puncture into a blowout. Papers now seem to be the equivalent of the railroads at the start of the twentieth century—a once-great business eclipsed by a new technology. In a famous 1960 article called “Marketing Myopia,” Theodore Levitt held up the railroads as a quintessential example of companies’ inability to adapt to changing circumstances. Levitt argued that a focus on products rather than on customers led the companies to misunderstand their core business. Had the bosses realized that they were in the transportation business, rather than the railroad business, they could have moved into trucking and air transport, rather than letting other companies dominate. By extension, many argue that if newspapers had understood they were in the information business, rather than the print business, they would have adapted more quickly and more successfully to the Net.

Which got me thinking: what is our "business"? I am not referring to the horrible distortion of academe into some kind of a customer- and industry-friendly corporate model.  That is a different discussion for another day.

But, if, suppose, "liberal education, and developing life-long learning skills" are the business that we are in, then shouldn't we learn from the newspapers and make sure that we too don't become irrelevant in a way?  

Look at the parallel: there is a great deal of interest in news reports and analysis and, interestingly enough, there is way more than what we need that can be freely accessed.  Journalists are beginning to complain that while their work, skills, and knowledge are recognized as important, there is no money in them in the web-based model.  In fact, the NY Times itself is so deep in debt that by May it has to raise 400 million dollars.  Of course, the parent company of the LA Times went bankrupt! 

The other day the recently retired managing editor of WaPo (whatever his name is!) was a guest on Terry Gross' Fresh Air.  He said that going by the number of visits to the WaPo site, it is clear that the paper has never had such a readership ever in its history.  The challenge, he said, for WaPo and every paper was to figure out how to translate that phenomenal readership into money.

On a similar note, knowledge, which used to be available in restricted brick and mortar campus environments, is now freely available for anyone who wants to learn.  Want to make cocaine? Want to read the complete works of Shakespeare? You have questions?  The Web has answers! At the rate at which Google is everywhere, it won't surprise me if the company comes up with a neat way to offer a formal education through Google itself!  

Aren't we looking at the same fate that the newspaper industry is facing?

Online teaching and learning is, therefore, an extremely important strategy to avoid the redundancy that we otherwise face.  We might have a few more years left in terms of the system delivering "captive audiences" who will fill the classroom space.  But, that time will end soon.  It is not if, but is a question of when that end will come.