Newspapers are dying, as any media observer could tell you.  But I don’t get the strident call to “burn the boats,” as Cortés supposedly did when he conquered Mexico for Spain. Never mind that the legend never happened, this advice doesn’t make sense in light of the beliefs of the people saying it.

Boat-burning advocate Marc Andreessen understands disruptive innovation as well as anyone.  At the very core of the startup culture that Marc helped create is a belief that small companies in the aggregate have a huge advantage over incumbents for bringing disruptive innovations to market.  A big company can’t become a small startup simply by destroying its current revenue model and firing all its employees – that would only result in a burned out shell, not a new startup.  A new startup can only be formed by innovators coming together to form a new company.  I realize there are exceptions to these statements, but they are very few and far between.  So “burning the boats” is statistically likely to be an exceptionally bad strategy for newspaper companies.

Tech writer Erick Schonfeld says it’s hard to watch the newspaper industry die slowly, noting that it could take decades for the newspaper industry to dwindle from $30 billion dollars a year down to nothing.  But Erick’s been covering startups for over 15 years, he’s seen successful startups kill the dinosaurs time and time again.  Like all of us in the startup world, he celebrates the success of startups against incumbents.  I don’t get the lamentation here – is it because the bedside deathwatch is comprised of relatives of the victim?  Who is burning the boats supposed to help, the dying incumbents or the anguished observers?

Given that the startups are going to beat the incumbents anyway, there’s nothing wrong with newspapers dying slowly.  Twenty years of slow death isn’t preventing innovation – all the innovators are outside the incumbents anyway.  But inside the incumbents are real people, hundreds of thousands of people who depend on their dying jobs to feed their families, many of whom aren’t going to succeed on the other side of the disruption.  Is there something wrong with letting those people eke out another twenty years of dead-end jobs?

This isn’t soft-hearted humanitarianism.  My heart’s hard enough to admire a capitalist system that sometimes causes individual misfortune.  But my point here is that the slow death of newspapers is an example of capitalism working correctly.  Big-footed incumbents are supposed to lose to startups.  Large companies are supposed to cling to their dying revenue streams while nimble competitors bring innovation to market.

Investors in those large companies have already “priced in” slow death – the stock price reflects the conventional wisdom that these companies will slowly go out of business.  The stock price for public newspaper companies most certainly does not price in a “burn the boats” strategy, which would result in irresponsible destruction of shareholder value, as well as damaging all those jobs and lives.

This is actually a place where brutal capitalism and soft-hearted compassion have common ground.  Newspapers are dying and no one is going to do anything about it.  For the love of humanity and capitalism, just let ’em die a slow death.