What If Your Newspaper Had Engineers

The disruptive influences of technology are clearly visible in the publishing industry.  From your local newspaper to a trip to the local Barnes & Noble - the world of Moore's Law and Metcalfe's Law have had huge impacts to an old industry.  The current issue of Fortune has an interesting article (The New News Business) on the issues and problems of the publishing industry.  The world of the Hearsts, the Publitzers, the Sulzbergers, the Grahams, the Chandlers, the Coxes, the Knights, the Ridders, the Luces, the Brancofts have had a very difficult time understanding the world and thinking of the Gates, Page, Brin, Schmidt, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Case, and Jobs.  The world of journalism just never took the time or had the interest to understand the world of engineering and technological innovation.

Could the outcome been different if the newspaper giants had seen that they didn't have any engineers and that you cannot innovate and build new products without engineers in your field (or at least partner with organizations that do have engineers)?  Journalism, photography, and video production are all creative crafts - the publishing world forgot to celebrate engineering as a fellow creative craft.  Consider this from the article:

"The very core of the revolution was technological, with every new advance being driven by innovations in computer engineering, something most publishing companies never bought into.  They viewed engineering as a means to an end - plumbing - a way to enable their core journalism to travel around the world through this magical new distribution channel called the World Wide Web."