Cold Comfort: Lessons for the Twenty-First-Century Newspaper Industry from the Twentieth-Century Ice Industry

Abstract

Abstract:First cut from frozen lakes and later manufactured on an industrial scale, ice was, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, big business. This article uses the collapse of the ice manufacturing and distribution business in the early twentieth century as a lens through which to view the current situation among the newspaper industries of Western countries, particularly North America and Europe. Each industry involves the production and distribution of a commodity and a legacy technology that is superseded. The analogy is imperfect, but the alignments and the imperfections of

Nascent, Liminal, and Emerging Technologies

“…At the same time, the existing domain can be seen the innovation as a threat to its entrenched interests (Lucas Jr and Goh, 2009). It can also be seen in the clash of interests associated with mechanical refrigeration (Duffy et al, 2017). Before the development of mechanical refrigerators, many homes had ice boxes that needed a supply of ice to cool the food.…”

“…After a period of technological gestation, it was then perfected and reapplied to a wide variety of other applications. It was used to power factories and workshops of various types (Taylor, 1844), run refrigeration machines that produced ice (Duffy et al, 2017), and transport people and goods (Bostrom and Yudkowsky, 2011). Steam technology also facilitated the development of the factory system, wage labor, the development of cities, for a period, child labor, capitalist accumulation, etc.…”

Digital Transitions

“…Cost-cutting and editorial redundancies became the standard industry response to withered revenues, while print product innovation focused on "processes for efficiency improvements" (Krumsvik 2012b, 123). Such managerial actions often safeguarded news's commodity value in quarterly and annual returns, but damaged its social good value (Meyer 2009;Duffy et al 2017). They also represented a continuation of the rigid managerial approaches that had developed in the more stable pre-Web media environment to support short-term profits (Soloski 2013;Meyer 2009).…”

“…Media portfolios tend to be fluid, as corporations increase or decrease investment in certain activities, discontinue or launch products, divest unprofitable operations, develop new business areas, and engage in horizontal or vertical integration (Picard 2005). Portfolio shifts affect resource allocations across a corporation, and require high degrees of organisational learning through the management of new organisational structures, technological systems, production processes and employee skill-sets (Doyle 2013b: Picard 2005Duffy et al 2017). Such adjustments mean that the position of a particular media business or product is not fixed within a corporation's portfolio.…”

Reviewing the Nexus of Participatory Journalism and Mediatized Engagement

“…Today, we can witness a peak of initiatives across the globe to foster the acceleration of digital entrepreneurial activity in the news media in many areas, ranging from the origination of ideas and creative opportunities, the identification and sourcing of capital and other resources, the institutional policy frameworks, to risks and uncertainties related with the creation and development of "digital start-ups", and not-for-profit blogs and other digital native publications. Notably, if legacy news media continue to be innovation-adverse and ignorant to adapting their media channels to the requirements of an engaged and increasingly interactive audiences, these disruptions will eventually force them to exit the industry (Duffy, Ling, & Westlund, 2017;Horst, Murschetz, Brennan, & Friedrichsen, 2018).…”