On his blog, Bob Massie parallels the purposes of the newspaper and the university. For a provocative blog post, he explores the thought experiment of the New York Times and Harvard University merging.
At first I wonder about how apt each one is for the other in a practical sense.
Students at Harvard Student Agencies do publish the successful Let’s Go! budget travel guide with student writers updating the books each year. A more relevant example may be the Poynter Institute which owns the St. Petersburg Times.
Could the Poynter-Petersburg arrangement be better as a merger though, rather than a ownership-profit setup. Let’s see what Bob has to say:
Currently both universities and newspapers rely on the same old-fashioned and restrictive business model: they try to channel the flow of information into a bottleneck which they control, and then they charge people for access to the information. We know that some forms of learning can only take place among actual human beings learning from each other in “meatspace” (though I prefer the term “meetspace.”) But as both the news and the human intellectual genome bottled up in colleges are increasingly released on to the Internet for free, the justification for these forms of restriction will begin to fall. And more and more are recognizing that global free education is a right, not a privilege. Equally important, it is possible.
[...]
In an era when it would be cheaper for the New York Times to buy a Kindle reader for every subscriber rather than to keep cutting down trees, when more and more people get their news on Google than through a subscription to any one paper, and when universities are trying to blow up the walls and silos that keep their brilliant employees from solving multidisciplinary problems and to share the courses openly on the Internet, we need to rethink how information and education are linked — from scratch.
– “BREAKING NEWS”: Why the New York Times and Harvard Should Merge 7 Feb 2009