Newspapers can’t innovate — need “Switzerland Inc.” to survive

Tom Mohr ran the online properties of Knight Ridder, the second largest newspaper company in the country, until it was sold to McClatchy this year.

He has just written a piece for Editor & Publisher, which is the equivalent of a Clarion call for action for the newspaper industry. The nation’s struggling newspapers desperately need to join forces and form a single company (which he calls “Switzerland Inc.”) to help them survive in the new world. Right now, they’re mired in internal bickering.

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It is instructive that after twelve years of the consumer web, not a single example of breakthrough online innovation has emerged out of a newspaper company. Not in recruitment. Not in auto. Not in classifieds. Not in shopping, directory, new ad models, or content aggregation.

We know Tom from our days at the Mercury News, when we talked with him about a possible VentureBeat partnership with Knight Ridder. He was very engaged. This E&P piece is laden with examples, a great summary for those of you in the media industry. In short, old news is getting killed. The truly breakthrough online successes—Google, Yahoo!, MySpace, Amazon.com, Monster, eBay, Wikipedia, Shopzilla, etc.—have emerged from teams led by internet-savvy visionaries and loaded with tech DNA .

We bumped into Mohr recently, who told us about his new gigs. He is an “executive in residence” at Charles River Ventures, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, which means he helps the firm evaluate new opportunities in the media space, and provide operational advice to firm’s investments in that area. He is also director of the New Media Innovation Lab at Arizona State University.