Roll the clock back 10 years. Had newspapers switched to continual vs daily publishing (via their websites only) and added community reaction in the form of comments, I wonder where they’d be today.
I was inside a Gannett newspaper 10 years ago, and I lobbied pretty hard for continual publishing. A few rolling updates was as close as it ever got.
In a nutshell, the argument against [continual updates] was that broadcasters would scoop the primary distribution channel if they got a hold of the news before it went to print.
Had they (we) said screw the broadcasters and just posted articles as they hit, a good deal of community discussion would have been generated by the time the press was warming up. Select comments could have been included with the article when it went to print. It would have made the print rag a lot more interesting than anything the local television stations could have done with 10 lines on the teleprompter.
In all fairness, I don’t remember much discussion regarding article comments at the time. But, either way, the newspaper industry is a pretty good example of what happens when you pay too much attention to competition and not enough attention to potential.