newspaper's comparative advantage?

Since we talked about collaboration on Monday that how audiences are becoming producers and the possibility of collaborative scholarly work, Nan and Jacie decided to work on this post together. They started a google doc and wrote up this response on their own computers at the same time within one document (without seeing each other cause they've got enough of that in the past 4.5 years).

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Comparative advantage means that a nation (or a firm?) has advantage in producing a good with less opportunity cost.
But in the text, it is articulating the theory in the context of "international trade,"Examples?? If we want to apply that to journalism, we can either apply that to newspapers in different countries?
or within a country, newspapers in different locations/regions?

Ok, then in terms of making national news, does NY Times have comparative advantage than other local/national papers?
It should be the case. Also, local newspapers have comparative advantage in each individual market because they have the comparative advantage of localness. For example, the Statesman would have more Austin news/information than other newspapers in the U.S. (but who want to trade/cooperate with the Statesman?)

We have already seen that local and national TV network collaborated to serve the local market. For example, Kvue news runs the CBS's national evening news at 6 or 7 p.m.? And before or after that it shows the local news and wheather report.
So comparative advantage is applied to TV news already, but not so much for newspaper sites? Newspapers work more as "closed economies"? The New York Times actually does link to outside sites, but probably not local newspapers. For example, in NYT's technology section, it links to
top stories on other sites, such as rival sources online, gigaom.com, idg.com, etc.
NY Times does not really have So newspaper sites do this as well (at least to some degree?)
True, I think that is smart because NY Times does not have advantages in tech reporting especially in terms of personnel and resources.

Oh, and should we talk about the SOURCE of comparative advantage? I am always curious of who are really doing the tech works for online newspaper. If you check out today's NY Time home page there are beautiful multimedia things that they are doing. Are they outsourcing those works?
The infographic is pretty awesome. I guess they have their own staff working on that inforgraphic. Even with large view, there's no credits attributed to outsourcing.
umh...but would that be more efficient if they do so? those multimedia things need quite a learning curve....
Learning curve...... hopefully that is something learnable...... What I heard is that NYT just started hiring staff who just graduated because those newly graduates have more multimedia skills (but the infographic doesn't look like something made by a j school major).

Do newspapers have "abundantly endowed" factors as a nation might have? For exmple, on p.317, it says China has abundant cheap labor.
I like the idea "abundantly endowed" factors. The newspapers are really good at opinions and photos I think. TV are good at video. if they really work on those on their site, there should be gains.
MSNBC.com has something similar to NYT's infographic too on the homepage, but NYT's is better than MSNBC's.

OK, in sum, media firms should clearly identify their comparative advantage, make further investments in the "abundantly endowed" factors that make them competitive and work with others who have comparative advantages in complementary areas.