Reed Hastings has been on a rollercoaster ride in the 13 years since he founded Netflix. From punchline to genius to toast to genius and back, several times over, it seems. In a talk Tuesday night in his hometown of Santa Cruz with TechCrunch’s Sara Lacy, so-sponsored by UC Santa Cruz, he talked about the ride and his learnings. He’s a thoughtful guy, with experiences well beyond the movie rental business. Most significantly, he’s a leader in education reform, and plainly well-informed about the news business crisis.
Though he mentioned the newspaper industry only in a single passage — “There’s a special case around newspapers that’s been different…a ton of highly profitable regional monopolies that employed way more journalists than you needed if you had national reach” — his building of a company with almost 10 million subscribers is noteworthy. That’s five times the number of subscribers of the country’s leading newspaper. The number, though, isn’t important; it’s the Netflix, and Hastings’, philosophy that’s worth applying.
Reed Hastings’ Six Lessons for the Newspaper Industry | Newsonomics by Ken Doctor
This is a very good post, and you should read the whole thing. I like it and Ken Doctor does a good job with the ‘Six Lessons’ offering some good nuggets to think about. However, the comparison is a little off? Netflix does not produce any of the movies it distributes. Newspapers create a lot of the content it distributes. Would Netflix survive if it had to budget to create it’s own movies? Still a good post – not trying to destroy it. Perhaps just suggesting “lessons for the newspaper industry” was a little too strong of a conclusion. And perhaps Doctor was only addressing the distribution side of the newspaper industry and softening the kick in the pants it so richly deserves with these well written lessons.