Yesterday’s news becomes new ‘blueprint’ - Blue Ocean Strategy

Yesterday’s news becomes new ‘blueprint’ - Blue Ocean Strategy

To break out of red oceans, companies must overstep accepted boundaries of how they compete. Instead of looking within these boundaries, businesses need to systematically scan across what Blue Ocean Strategy calls the Six Paths: Alternative industries, strategic groups, buyer groups, complementary offerings, functional-emotional orientation of an industry, and important trends. This gives companies fresh insight into how to reconstruct markets to open up blue oceans opportunities.

A recent Fast Company story revealed how Rob Curley, a self-proclaimed ‘35-year-old overcaffeinated and entrepreneurial Internet punk’ is defying the newspaper industry’s model of business and even its way of reporting. And, along the way, Curley is creating a Blue Ocean of his own.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that newspaper readership has been steadily on the decline. In fact since 1989, papers in the US have lost 8 million subscribers and the percentage of adults who read a daily during the week has plummeted to scarcely half the population.

So how is Curley able to breath new life into a declining industry in a Blue Ocean Strategy way? Here’s an overview:

Bucking the system. Curley doesn’t accept something because it’s “how we've always done it."

Eliminating the competition through ‘hyperlocalization.’ Rather than mirroring the national and international topics covered by the biggies like CNN, Curley’s smaller, home-town sites focus on local news which oftentimes would not get reported. Curley focuses on topics which define the local community: Politics in Topeka, basketball in Lawrence, real estate in Naples. This resonates in an industry in which 85% of papers have circulations under 50,000.

Complementary product and service offerings. Curley’s web sites complement his printed papers, and contain provocative content that make them a cross between a library and a museum. For example, the Topeka Capital-Journal's legislative site included texts of every bill and each representative's top campaign contributors.

Viral appeal. Curley states “I want a site to be so cool and important to people that they talk about it the way you talk about having a great park where you live. It's a local amenity."
And it seems that the wind keeping Curley’s sails unfurled isn’t likely to wither away any time soon. For instance, just three years after Curley took over a project to cover the University of Kansas Jayhawks teams in ways the local paper couldn’t, monthly page views soared from around 500,000 to a peak of around 13 million. Not bad for a town with 82,000 residents. And presently Curley serves as vice-president for the interactive subsidiary whose role it is to innovate, and innovate fast, across companies like the Post, Newsweek, and Slate.

Do you know of maverick businessmen and women who are defying conventional wisdom and creating Blue Oceans? Share your success stories with us.