Newspapers aren’t dying, and other interesting ideas from a media tech CEO

Newspapers are dying and digital publishers are on a rocket to the moon. Right?

Not so fast, says Tien Tzuo, founder and CEO of Zuora, which is a service that helps subscription businesses run. I don’t think the print vs. digital conversation, which has been going on for more than a decade, is very interesting at this point, but Tzuo says some interesting things about how those print operations that are thriving are doing it.

In Let’s get over the whole ‘newspapers are dying’ thing in The Guardian, Tzuo argues, “Newspapers are intellectual assets, not physical ones. Their core product consists of making smart editorial decisions and publishing sharp voices. Whether you choose to read those voices on a phone or on a broadsheet makes no difference.”

With that out of the way, he looks at several newspaper companies in the U.K. that are thriving, including, ahem, The Guardian. What they’re doing is a pretty good roadmap for any individual too:

First, they create non-commodified content … They recognise that they can’t compete with social networks in terms of aggregation, so they make sure to offer informed perspectives, strong arguments and compelling entertainment that readers can’t find anywhere else.

Secondly, they study online behaviour with relentless curiosity: what time of day people read, how they browse (“lean back” versus “lean in”), which content consistently surfaces and why …

Thirdly, they bundle additional services sensibly. Whether its mobile sports video highlights or free music streams, they make smart choices about which additional services actually enhance the reader experience, as opposed to being simple perks …

And so on. Of course Tzuo has his own interests—he sells a set of tools to help companies run subscription businesses, after all. Newspapers, for example. But his points are worth listening to. They make sense. Here’s one more:

This isn’t just a personal opinion. Forrester Research, which keeps tabs on roughly 85% of the global GDP, thinks we’re at the beginning of a new 20 year business that they call “The Age of the Customer.” They see a broad, systemic shift in capital models pivoting towards serving a newly empowered generation of customers that have the ability to price, critique and purchase anytime, anywhere.

You’ve surely heard about the runaway podcast hit “Serial.” As David Carr points out in that New York Times piece, it’s no accident that a podcast has become a cultural phenomenon now: Technology has made podcasts easy to consume. What do changes like that mean for the content you produce?