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Collaboration is the future Monday, November 3rd, 2008

Vin Crosbie has dug up some interesting history in a recent piece for ClickZ. He writes about how, 13 years ago, major media groups in the US attempted to get together and aggregate their stories into a (then huge) news search engine, so that people would come to one spot to look for news.

The consortium, called the New Century Nework (NCN), also planned to create a classified advertising search engine that would draw its content from all those dailies. And it planned to create a single advertising system that would allow advertisers to place banner ads to across any geographic or demographic strata of those newspapers’ Web sites.

As Crosbie writes, “Unfortunately, the nine major newspaper companies were more used to competing against each other than cooperating. With some exceptions, they didn’t loan their best new media personnel to this cooperative effort. They weren’t able to agree upon a CEO from among their own companies for the consortium, ultimately having to go outside and pick an executive without any background in either newspapers or online. Then, when the consortium began launching its services and earning some money, the companies argued with each about who should get what share, despite previous agreements about that. All the while, each of the companies was progressing with its own new media plan that would each compete with their cooperative effort.

So what happened? Within months of launching its first services, the NCN imploded. Within months, Google was started, and it soon launched Google News, which aggregates news stories from all over the world. Meanwhile, the local classifieds service Craigslist grew virally to the point where it now offers free classified advertising for tens of millions of users around the world.

As Crosbie writes, “Nothing today is causing more destruction in the media industries than the companies within each of its sectors failing to cooperate fully with each other. You don’t get to build the world of the future by competing tooth and nail.”

The community-based nature of the Internet and its agnostic approach to information mean that if you want to get ahead, you have to get along.