Netscape co-founder: shut off the print edition right now

”The financial markets have discounted forward to the terminal conclusion for newspapers, which is basically bankruptcy,” says Marc Andreessen, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur.

37-year-old Andreessen is a multi-millionaire software engineer best known as co-author of Mosaic, the first widely-used web browser, and founder of Netscape Communications Corporation. He is also a co-founder of Ning, a company which provides a platform for social-networking websites. He sits on boards of directors of Facebook and eBay.

Portfolio magazine’s Kevin Maney asked him: ”If you were running the New York Times, what would you do?,”

Mr. Andreessen responded:

”Shut off the print edition right now. You’ve got to play offense. You’ve got to do what Intel did in ’85 when it was getting killed by the Japanese in memory chips, which was its dominant business. And it famously killed the business—shut it off and focused on its much smaller business, microprocessors, because that was going to be the market of the future. And the minute Intel got out of playing defense and into playing offense, its future was secure. The newspaper companies have to do exactly the same thing.

The financial markets have discounted forward to the terminal conclusion for newspapers, which is basically bankruptcy. So at this point, if you’re one of these major newspapers and you shut off the printing press, your stock price would probably go up, despite the fact that you would lose 90 percent of your revenue. Then you play offense. And guess what? You’re an internet company.”

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