The good news is those that would survive and thrive are in control of their own destiny. The challenges and opportunities that these news businesses face can be rethought, addressed, and fixed. It’s similar to what any successful business goes through.

The guidelines and the characteristics for winning are the same.

It requires the following.

Vision: The difference between vision and hallucination is others can see vision. It is critical to articulate a bright future with clarity that everyone can see.

Scrappiness: Tough challenges call for resourcefulness and pragmatism. You need to stay close to the ground, wallowing in every detail and all over any opportunity that arises.

Experimentation: You may not have all the right answers up front, but running many experiments changes the battle for the right way forward from arguments to tests. You get data, which leads to correctness and ultimately finding the right answers.

Adaptability: Ask yourself, would you rather be right or successful? That needs to be top of mind at all times because times change and we change. You want strong views weakly held.

Focus: Once you gain clarity from experiments and adaptation, then it’s time to focus on a small number of ultra-clear goals. When those are defined then it’s all-hands-on-deck.

Deferral of gratification: You need the stomach (and resources!) to reject near-term rewards for enduring success. In journalism this means refusing to participate in the race to the bottom.

An entrepreneurial mindset: This is true both for new companies and existing companies. It’s a bit of a mantra. We own the company. We make the business. We control our future. It’s on us.

– @pmarca dropping knowledge and being hella bullish on the news business.  The guidelines and the characteristics for winning are, of course, fully transferrable.

http://a16z.com/2014/02/25/future-of-news-business/

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OK, now zoom-in and contrast Marc’s POV, with Seth’s on questions we ask ourselves when we’re buying:

Most of the time, when we’re buying non-commodity items, we’re asking ourselves questions like:

• How much pain am I in right now?
• Do I deserve this?
• What will happen to the price in an hour or a week? If it changes, will I feel smart or dumb?
• What will my neighbors think?
• Does it feel fair?
• and, What sort of risks (positive and negative) are involved? (This is why eBay auctions don’t work for the masses).

Pricing based on cost, then, makes no sense whatsoever. Cost isn’t abstract, but value is.

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// And that’s a quick peek at the constant POV shifting that we do as we design. Zoom out. Zoom in.