The Disruption Is Coming from Inside the Building
Layoffs at the fast-shrinking San Francisco Chronicle have freed up a lot of office space in the newspaper's headquarters. So naturally the Chronicle is now subleasing to a guy who severely undercut its business model in the first place. Spooky.
Jack Dorsey is no longer a day-to-day executive at Twitter, but he used to be CEO of the microblogging service and is widely credited with coming up with the idea for brokering 140-character status updates. Those updates, in turn, now carry a large amount of local news and commentary of which papers like the Chronicle, which is losing circulation and money most months, were once the main suppliers.
Which is why it's more than a touch ironic that Dorsey is leasing space in the Chronicle building for his new credit-card processing startup Square. Joining him will be two tech "incubators" that promise to nurture technology as disruptive as Twitter. This is sort of like renting space inside your body for one of those creatures from Alien. It will explode out of your stomach and devour you someday. Look out, Chronicle!
