I have a part-time job a few nights a week at a J.C. Penney store. Fifty years ago, if you asked J.C. Penney what its “core business” was, the answer probably would have been brick-and-mortar department stores. But now catalog and online sales are a huge part of the business, with catalog departments in the stores and signs everywhere encouraging people to use the Web site too.

At some point, J.C. Penney probably faced a choice: “Given that mail order and the internet have the potential to pull some business away from brick-and-mortar stores, do we make a point of NOT having a Web site or a catalog, for the sake of protecting our brick-and-mortar stores? Or do we decide that our MERCHANDISE is our core business, not the medium we use to sell it to people, and consequently expand into any medium that seems like it might help us move that merchandise?”

I guess one way of attacking it would be to try scenarios where one thing or the other — either the physical newspaper or the timely content — is removed from the equation, and see which does better.

When we present the timely content without the physical newspaper, through a Web site, we find that there is still demand for it. If we presented the physical newspaper without the timely content — say, by trying to give out copies of a paper from last month, full of old stories and ads for sales that are already over — would anyone take it?

Probably not a perfect analogy, though. Hm. I’ll have to think about that.

I don’t think it’s a trivial point. Your implication that newspapers (and maybe local radio and TV stations?) are the only “news organizations” that count (and the only ones that will count in the future) has been widely shared by legacy organizations and has undermined their strategic thinking.

I also think you’re implying that “Web site” means “a frequently updated page of recent news, most of it written in the style of newspaper stories.” I can imagine a lot of news organizations (including the one I’m starting this summer) that have Web sites, but not *that* sort of Web site.

That said, I definitely agree with your premise that businesses should not produce anything at a loss unless there’s a good business reason to do so.

… our core product is not a newspaper. Our core product is INFORMATION, not the medium by which information is delivered.