How Industries Fail

[koganbot]

Michael Nielson (Is scientific publishing about to be disrupted?): The problem is that your newspaper has an organizational architecture which is, to use the physicists' phrase, a local optimum. Relatively small changes to that architecture - like firing your photographers - don't make your situation better, they make it worse.

I don't know if Nielson is right, but he gives a good, clear explanation of how newspapers, acting intelligently and rationally, will nonetheless have trouble taking actions that will allow them to flourish. The actions may just not be there to take.

(h/t Tom Ewing)