Slashdot Mirror
Adapt to New Technology or Die
An anonymous reader writes "Yahoo! News is reporting that in a recent speech to fellow stationers and newspaper makers, Rupert Murdoch has stated that the 'newspaper industry needs to embrace the technological revolution of the Internet, MP3 players, laptops and mobile phones or face extinction.'"
Clearly, analog data distribution is dead. On the digital side, the importance lies in the method of distribution. There are various methods for distribution and these methods are changing quite often. All things considered, there is obvious importance in staying up to date with technological trends. -c
Seriously, with all the crap this guy has ushered into media, he can say "questioning and better educated consumers" with a straight face?
Ok, all that aside, I think he's about 6 years late with that rhetoric. Most media are already edging, some hesitantly, others a bit faster, toward embracing new technologies. The core problem is how to make a buck at it. Traditional channels have done very well for him. I can't see them entirely going away.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The biggest reason that newspapers have it so tough is that the delivery person keeps throwing my newspaper down the hallway. Not near my door, not even at my door, but down the hallway. On Sunday mornings, I find my paper at the bottom of the stairs after the ads been rifled through. Customer service is what needed to save the newspaper industry! I hate to see MP3 players being toss down the hallway...
wtf is up with these "--------------- or die" analogies. Fuck you, fuck death. I'll just sit back and watch.
What I see happening is that information is being broken down more and more into sound bites and geared more towards the intended audience. For example, you'll hear a completely different take on a story say from Fox as you would from Salon.com. That's assuming they even cover the same stories all the time.
There's only a few folks who will actually want to read the whole story - whatever it might be. And there's even fewer media outlets that will come out and actually state their leanings. The only one that comes to mind is "The Economist" (they state quite often that they are "a conservative newspaper.").
Saturday is April 1. Slashdot will be shut down. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Traditional media needs to take a que or two from Google.
Sergey Brin made the statement once that you need to innovate on all levels including business models. When Google first launched they were just like any other startup, cool technology but no profit model. He was determined to have a profitable business and thus Google Adwords was born.
The point is this; the migration of print media isn't about just transitioning the text from a paper page to a website. It's about knowing the context of the environment (e.g. interactive) and finding ways to embrace that environment so that the consumer benefits (e.g. more knowledge, entertained, etc) and profits are sustained.
Piracy, aggregation, new media formats, many things threaten the media players. Murdoch is saying that they have two choices. Bitch about your IP rights or coopt the technologies that are threatening your business. It's a realistic and good attitude. Their refusal to accept reality has been as bad as an anti-war person getting drafted, sent to the front lines and then proceeding to bitch about the unfairness and evil of it all instead of fighting to stay alive as the bullets zip past their head. Accept reality or die. My kind of motto.
old technologies don't die, they just get shoved around and reincarnated in alternate, smaller forms
take radio. there was once a time when people sat around these giant vacuum tube behemoths listneing to serials like "only the shadow knows"
tv killed that kind of radio, but radio came back as the medium for music, the golden age of the radi dj
now in the internet age, and with satellite radio, radio has an even smaller niche. and yet talk shows and drive-time formats still mean radio has a purpose
old media never dies, it just loses its lustre and fills smaller, less lucrative niches
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Where they had P. Diddy show up with his "Vote or Die" crew.
I can see them yelling at the PETA people "Adapt to New Technology or Die!!!!" and then shooting the whole lot of them for refusing.
http://images.google.com/images?q=vote%20or%20die
One of those pics isn't SFW... but I approve.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Wikinews hasn't been the newspaper-killer that Wikipedia is to encyclopedias. ...but then again, people forget that Wikipedia started in 2001.
Becoming an overnight tech success takes years :-) I still love good 'ould text.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
There's an interesting case of a newspaper reacting to another media technology: The Chicago Tribune wanted to create a sort of alternative newspaper, and for the comic section they started a program called "Sam and Henry". The Time: 1926. The media threat: Radio. Sam & Henry went on to become the fantastically popular Amos and Andy.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I remember when newspapers were facing extinction from the internet 8 years ago.
They have a unique lock on push delivery of local advertisements. That will keep them alive.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Must be past the end of the Paper Boy Era.
When I was in my late teens I inherited my older brother's paper route. It was somewhere about 65 customers. As this was my main source of income I took a particularly aggressive view towards growing and maintaining the route. In 3.3 years I had it up to 150+ customers, much to the annoyance of paper boys of neighbouring routes. My parents always sent me out with our paper, just in case I saw someone moving into a new house -- I'd introduce myself and give them the paper free and ask if I could sign them up. I was breaking my back, but I was also raking in some decent cash for a highschool kid. I made certain papers weren't left in wet or could be blown away or anything. When I retired and left for college the newspaper said it was too large a route for any one carrier and split it.
Now people drive past and chuck papers in the general vicinity of doors. I know what you mean.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Funny coincidence. This was on Audible.com so I grabbed it last week. He makes a lot of sense. My favorite part was when some hopeful newspaper editor in the audience asked if he was thinking about buying any more newspapers. He burst the guy's bubble by saying "NO!" and going on to explain that it would be a bad investment. I guess that was really the whole point of the talk -- the antique news media better come up with something new or it's going to die.
What is interesting though, is how I expected the article to be crap.. Slashdot has linked so many obvious flame-bait stories it's ridicilous. Seriously; why, oh why, do I read this site?
"" How about taking the safety labels off everything, and let the stupidity-problem solve itself? """
I can wait for a site to load, I just go take a bath or something; and it's there when I get back. For downloading cds, I can just wge-aaaagggh.
[no carrier]
Is this why he bought Myspace?
really 867993
Karma schkarma
This has been his line for at least 20 years (since the dispute at Wapping) and probably longer.
However, my (entirely subjective) experience is that the newspapers that tend to get quoted / referenced in other online articles* from the UK and Australia aren't the News Corp ones - from the UK it's as often as not the Scotsman and the Guardian, followed by the rest; from Australia it's the Sydney Morning Herald. Maybe it's my reading that tends to steer me away from places likely to quote Murdoch papers - but I'm sure that that's not the whole story.
(*excluding Fark and The Sun, of course).
It's the newspaper industry...the "paper" part should have already alerted the industry to the fact that they were in trouble, couple that with steadily declining sales and booming internet usage and the message has been loud and clear for a good few years now. Still, it makes a good headline for one of News Corps papers "Murdoch says newspapers f****d!".
I liked the bit at the end of the article which credits the News Corp move to Wapping as "paving the way for developments such as colour printing, supplements and websites."...now that's news to me!
$2B OR NOT $2B = $FF
It is hard to underestimate the power of casual purchases in a retail store. 50% of Christmas gifts are impulse purchases. Who is going to forego those sales by turning off retail distribution?
...but until there are some pretty radical advances in power storage, display and user interaction, there will always be a place for the newspaper. You can get the info anywhere, true. But right now, for a really small price, you get a very large "paper screen" with the info on it that you can browse through at your own speed regardless of battery life, internet connectivity and how much space you have around you. Yes, you can get the info in a browser, but have u ever tried lying back in bed and browsing with your laptop or other mobile device? How long is it before you get tired looking at the screen, get tired of the weight or notice the heat? Or how about just get tired of the position you have to be in to use the darn device?
Until those problems in technology are solved, I'm sorry Rupert, newspapers will not die.
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
What I expect Mr. Murdoch is thinking internally is "hmm, eventually viewpoints other than my own will start getting attention, as people stop listening to television news (which I dominate) and newspaper news (which I partially dominate), and start using the internet for news. I'd better buy up MySpace and make sure that I can blast my viewpoint just as loudly on the internet as I can on cable television."
Rupert Murdoch shouldn't care so much. The actuarial tables say he's due for extinction any minute now.
...To the RIAA/MPAA
A gimmicky headline like this, although it will bring me over from my feed, won't accomplish much more.
Articles should aim to be intelligent and informative, not just to get you to read them.
~= scwizard =~
Didn't they say that post offices would die within days (exaggeration on purpose :)) after email became accessible to almost everyone ?
I dont know about you but I still prefer the newspaper when I go on the toilet in the morning.
Not only because that damn battery on my LAPtop gets way too hot for my LAP, but also because of it's great re-usability, like if I run out of toilet paper. :D
But seriously, I prefer newspaper over RSS-feed any day, it's just so much better reading off paper then off monitors, I think we can all aggree on that.
At least I still buy the local newspaper and I intend to do that for as long as I can.
Rupert Murdock is a serious creep. It would be worth going without MP3, internet, and mobile phones for a while just to get rid of this guy. Unless, of course, he's just blowing smoke. Who knows? Maybe he does seriously believe what he's saying. If so, he's the only one who believes anything that he says.
Rupert Murdoch is not a good man. And if these comments are to be taken seriously he is not a smart man either. The internet is not simply a means of distribution of information. It is freedom of information. It allows us to be free of the "qualified" news source. Ten years ago, people like Rupert Murdoch thought they could dominate the media of the world. Today no one dominates the media of the world. On the internet (as it is now), that's simply not possible. So I expect by embrace Murdoch means destroy or restrict. After all, his media companies had to resort to lobbying the government to ensure that only the official channels (ABC,CBS,CNN,etc.) were allowed to be shown. Public television has been largely dismantled (or neutered rather) and I suspect the Rupert Murdoch's of the world would prefer the same route for the public internet.
He puts the genius back in "Evil Genius."
He's just saying that i'm going to take over profitable web based companies in a nice way. He has done this since he started out in business. Bought companies and turned them into his own agenda pushing propaganda machines. Myspace's featured profile would always come up as The O'Reilly Factor, any dissention about George Bush on a blog would lead to accounts being suspended etc etc. He's done it throughout his media mogul life.
There was a cartoon that someone once wrote that had Easy Reader from The Electric Company, a TV show for children on PBS that was educational, say that "print is dead".
Still I find newspapers good for coupon sections, and I like to read stories on paper format over screen format.
Newspapers are slowly being replaced with blogs, and blogs are popular because anyone can write them. The problem is that blogs have no jounralistic standard and don't always check the facts, it is style over substance, and most blogs post contraversial views to get readers. The newspapers tried to compete with blogs, by writing their stories the same way blogs did and not check the facts like they used to like The New York Times. Some newspapers even have their own blogs run by editors.
Radiostations and Cable TV channels already have those type of things, MP3/Real Player files, mobile and laptop designed web pages, etc. It is only a matter of time before a newspaper company catches up, but then could it honestly be called a newspaper company when it is mostly web based?
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Hello world!
There will still be an audience for it. It will get smaller, but I find it hard to believe that anything, even local news channels, still beat the newspaper for local news.
"Everything worth innovating today will go to court tomorrow."
fairly quickly, no matter how young his wife is.
While he may think he has a point, the Net has no love for frequently wrong newspapers, or even frequently wrong media such as TV, except where it's either:
a. funny - which his tend not to be;
b. satirical - which on a good day his aren't;
c. supported by someone with too much money for feeding the incurious public what large corporate greedheads want them to think unquestioningly.
um. oh. darn. I guess his media might survive, as they meet (c) and thus can continue to exist due to financial support they wouldn't otherwise qualify for.
Which leads me to ask: What is the sound of One Blog Posting?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
that the broadband video-on-demand revolution is happening right now, and that television networks are extinct? And that telecoms are scared spitless by Skype and Vonage? Predicting the end of newspapers is so 1997.
"A new generation of media consumers has risen demanding content delivered when they want it, how they want it, and very much as they want it."
Or in NewsCorp's example, consumers can access their propaganda, censored news, and op ed / tabloid trash when then want to, how they want to, and as frequently as they want to.
Mod me a troll if you must, but Rupert Murdoch... you truly suck.
When are we going to get a Borg / Murdoch icon for Slashdot?
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
I have to disagree about analog data distribution being dead, assuming you're talking about papers being delivered each morning. The vast majority of people still read the papers.
Having a paper to carry around and read is so much more convenient than having to read the paper on a laptop or something like that. When you're commuting to work each morning, you don't want to whip out your laptop and start reading the newspaper on it, which you would have had to have saved to it while rushing to get ready for work.
I think newspapers have at least a good 10 years left. That said, Mr Murdoch is right, in that media companies that do not embrace technology are doomed. The trick is mixing both the old and new, and not doing only one or the other. Maximise profits by doing both.
...but accepting theft is another.
There is a big difference between adapting to new markets and technology and allowing existing ones to be pilfered by thieves.
While the RIAA and MPAA certainly make themselves look stupid when they sue grandma's for downloading mp3s, they are simply trying to protect and existing marketplace.
It's no different than a shop owner calling the cops when somebody robs them at gun point. Do we expect the shop owner to adapt to robbery? No. We expect law enforcement to prevent that robbery and punish those who are caught after the fact.
Obviously there are lots of new market opportunities created by technology. MP3s have certainly changed the way we listen to music. But just as a gun makes it easier to rob a bank, mpeg compression makes it easier to share near full quality music with millions of people.
The industry IS slowly changing. They are investing massive amounts of money in DRM which will allow them to participate in the emerging markets created by compression schemes like MP3. Them trying to stop file sharers from distributing copyrighted material to millions of people illegally is a separate and independent issue.
I gotta say, this really made me laugh. I'm not sure why.
...is that Rupert Murdoch chooses not to adapt to new technologies. He'd be doing the world a favor.
Rural areas still have some people who are thankful to have a phone line most hours of the day. Broadband internet is just something they read about in the print newspapers!
For example, one house I used to lived in definitely did not have a "five nines" dial tone. Lightning, drunk drivers hitting phone poles, corrosion on decades-old lines, all have knocked out my phone service at times. There wasn't even cable TV--everyone had mini-dishes...if they had a view of the satellite.
Perhaps more by luck than chance, he found that if he could lever up the rock and place cylindrical logs under it, he could move it...
Some time later, another bloke less pre-disposed to living in a cave, decided to create circular discs, probably of wood, that could be placed in each corner of a heavy object by connecting them in order to move it easier - and so it was that "the wheel" was born...
And as we leap forward through the millenia to our present day, we see that the concept of the wheel remains fundamentally unchanged - it's still circular, probably has an axle and is best used in numbers of four or more.
The wheel, and numerous other technological developments over the centuries, serve to demonstrate that some inventions can be pretty much designed correctly from the time of their inception without the "need" to replace it completely purely for the purposes of technical advancement.
Besides, as the owner of "The Sun" newspaper in Britain, a journal aimed specifically at those modern-day individuals who are pre-disposed to cavemanhood & writing with crayons, can I suggest that you, sir, are a complete and utter gobshite who is totally out of his depth and has far too much money for his own good.
In summary, therefore, may I suggest that you continue publishing stories about "Lesbian Vicars" for those knucklescrapers who continue to find amusement for their unicellular brains in your newspaper & leave those of us who are more pre-disposed to understanding technology to make decisions about whether we still want paper newspapers or not.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
"The greatest challenge for the traditional media now is to engage with more demanding, questioning and better educated consumers, adapting their products for new technology,"
This is from the same guy that brought us the O'Reilly Factor. I think his statement qualifies as "Most Ridiculous Item" of the day.
Perhaps he should be taking his own advice. Why can't I get caught up on last week's "24" on On Demand, or iTunes? (Or any other Fox content, for that matter...)
When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat? -C. Palahniuk
e.g., newspaper is good for wrapping fish and chips
"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge, and where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"-T.S.Eliot
I for one welcome our new technological overlords.
Every day, I log onto a site affiliated with Fox or MSN, and every day, I see a new way of obscuring articles with advertising.
Then the site is designed in such a way as to be rendered unreadable if you disable those moronic flash advertisments that float around and make you wish you'd just bought the plain old newspaper.
aarghh!
Rupert Murdoch has said a lot of memorable things, among them, "Silence! Sieze them!"
Limina.Log
I for one, (fearfully) welcome our new adapting overlords....
Purple, because ice cream has no bones.
I think newspapers have completely changed with the times and as a result they have shallow articles targeted at young idiots. The result is that the entire demographic that actually wants to read newspapers has been turned off. The newspaper I want today is the one we had 40 years ago. Well-researched news and human interest stories about local and international topics. Enough meat so that you can consider yourself informed and have a discussion with another person. Even the NYT reads like the USA Today.
If newspapers just provided the service they were good at and didn't try to chase the technological trends there would be plenty of people to read them.
Have you considered investing in a laptop?
"You will all become one with the Fox News Borg!"
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
I know that a number of folks on /. might find this hard to believe, but there are a LOT of people out there who:
....but they do read the Daily News on the ferry on the way to work. Not that I want to generalize, but most tradesmen, cops and fireman I know have nothing more than a passing interest in computers...and even then it;s because they have to buy them for their kids.
1. Do not have a computer at home or are employed with one (yes, it's true)
2. Have a computer at work or home, but only use it for work/bookeeping, and don't know rss from css.
In either case, these people can not be reached by digital media. It just aint happening. This core group of "non computer enthusiasts" is the base market, and the target of traditional media. And these guys aren't going anywhere.
Blue collar types generally don't picture themselves sitting in front of a PC downloading the season finale of Galactica, or reading about the RNR Hall of Fame inductions on Billboard.com
The media industries need to both adapt and create new content (and figure out how to make money) for the computer literate, and balance scaling back the more traditional delivery (newspapers, CD's, etc) methods. Neither side is going anywhere, though it may be a few more years before things balance out.
wbs.
Huh?
Digital age meet gutenberg age. How about something like a TiVo, but for dead tree media? A programmable dedicated printer/box/appliance that automatically printed out YOUR idea of what should be in your "newspaper" or magazine? Every morning, get up, there's today's "news" all printed out, updated, and waiting for you? And your monthly magazines, and updated tech manuals, or latest novel or short story from your favorite writer, and so on? Leave it up to the subscriber what they really wanted on paper, not a one size fits no one exactly deal like they have now. Say you want just the latest politics, favorite market analysts, a few selected sports, and you didn't want latest household tips, brides, real estate classifieds and horoscope. And so on, serious customizable choice.
The bad part about dead tree papers and print magazines is you get so much you DON'T want, serious waste of paper and energy. I know you get this with RSS feeds, etc, I mean taking that idea a little bit further into the simple and functional electronic appliance realm.
It isn't just newspapers that need to embrace new technology, the same thing could be said for almost every industry. Technology's purpose is really to solve problems and improve on things. Any company that ignores those solutions and improvments will soon be left behind. Can you imagine the medical industry ignoring the X-ray machine, the CAT scan, and the MRI? Could you even imagine the manufacturing industry without the assembly line? No, yet in their day, these ideas were cutting edge technologies that before they came along, could hardly even be imagined.
Business has been forced to adapt or die ever since the first trader figured out how to move more product cheaply in order to out-sell his competition. That probably happened hundreds of years before Jesus walked the earth. This is NOT new news folks. Newspapers aren't immune and they have adapted and changed with the times. It wasn't all that long ago where color pictures were rare in a newspaper but today, color is common, especially in the larger papers.
I think Rupert's warning should be heeded, not just by newspapers but by all media. The most vunerable right now may be the folks that are higher-tech than the print media. It seems that the RIAA and the MPAA feel more threatened by technology than the newspapers. Thier resistance to the new kids on the block seems to be making them drag their heels in even trying to adopt the new ways in any meaningful manner.
Those that don't learn to adapt will fall behind. They will dry up and go away. Just like they have every generation before. It is the way it is, it is a dynamic that can't be changed or protected out of existance. Adopt or die is simply a fact of life in the business world. They better damed well get used to it.
Put all the news that's fit to print on line with click through advertisements (see USA Today, etc) and add on even more google ads and private ads.
If the on line ads generate more revenue for the newspapers, it would be a good thing.
And we need to reject this attempt to hijack a free media. The days of centralised media are gone. Newspapers, TV stations are already dead. We need to ensure that they stay this way.
We killed the RIAA and celebrated the revolution!! the revolution is ITunes music store... I don't mean to shock anyone, but ITMS *IS* the RIAA. Our failure to deliver a timely open source solution here has centralised this at the crucial moment of popularity.
Google is another example. We really need a bit torrent type distribution system for our search, for our email, for our news. Small chunks of data spread across many many computers with a lot of redundancy. Small enough chunks to be meaningless on their own (encrypted anyway).
It runs a little deeper than "open source". Decentralising the media is decentralising the economy and decentralising power.
So now is the crucial moment.
Rich Gentlemen Hide - The Existential Comic
Oh Noes! All that prechewed pablum GONE! Whatever will we DOOS!!
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Apparently what newspapers are really missing are:
* Bold, primary colors to inform Americans how to feel about "the issues"
* Big, moving, symbolic images and lines
* Stirring music
The real problem is that newspapers are still caught up in that "facts" fad..which totally puts their necks out on the line. What if they get a fact wrong? That would prove them "uncredible" - instead, what they should be doing is telling people what to think about topics in a way that is not legally binding!
Presenting facts and statistics is too complicated for the modern enlightened viewer. They need graphics!!
It's not clear to me you can have a viable paper without that classified ad revenue. Murdoch is right - unless the papers get a piece of that revenue they're doomed. It really doesn't matter if Aunt Clara refuses to get a computer or not; if they can't get the classified ads back they won't be able to produce a newspaper at a price she's willing to pay.
And I KNOW there are millions more like her.
H*ll, how do you think the inkjet printer business grows by leaps and bounds every year?
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
With respect: Spoken like someone who probably never ventured far from suburbia--who only *thinks* he knows what "flyover country" is like.
Technology is embraced with open arms by "rural people" my friend. Not only do they all have 24/7 telephones, they were early-adopters of satellite television and broadband internet (over their satellite dishes, a la "Starband").
And H*ll, most of 'em even have 'lectricity and wear SHOES, if you can believe it.
Sheesh.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
There's been a battle going on in news organisations between accountants and idealists. What you're seeing is evidence that the accountants have won. There are far fewer journalists writing the stories and what stories are written are shared and recycled between all the news services.
One day last year, according to journalism.org, Google News offered computer users a menu of 14,000 stories -- covering only 24 separate subjects.
The Annual Report on American Journalism http://www.stateofthenewsmedia.com/2006/narrative_ overview_intro.asp?cat=1&media=1 concludes that the loss of professional journalists (50% less than in early 1990s) has resulted in news which is thin, repetitive, narrowly focused and insubstantial.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
as much as some of you guys may hate him for [insert BS reason], he's got a point. Any communications medium that continues to follow one mode (like newspapers), will fail. That's why some newspapers are starting to have online versions, but they need to do more. However, if they do things like podcasts, etc., will they no longer be a newspaper, but an online news service?
The printing press displaced the technology of callography. Now, the press is being dispaced by newer "print' technologies, primarily the internet. A lot of the recent articles in the news make a big deal of the new technologies (cell phones, intenet sites, etc) displacing print news, but this is a trend that started over 50 years ago when people began to tune into nightly news instead of reading the paper, and even earlier than that when people used the radio to listen to the news. so will these new technologies put the final nail in the coffin of print media? My guess is no. Why? because older technologies have not killed print. People thought that video would kill the radio, but it didn't. People thought video-recorders would kill movie theatures, but it didn't. Similarly, allthough the traditional print media market may shrink, it is unlikely to die anytime soon.
Fool me once...shame on you, fool me twice...won't be fooled again (our president)
Water still wet, fire still hot, and Zonk still a moron.
Has anybody else noticed the ballooning number of things we either have to do, or we die?
First, it was simply Join or Die. Then Skate or Die. Vote or Die. Now this!
Somewhere in there we had the much more lax Live and Let Die.
I'm just glad to have made it this far.
± 29 dB
They should have a service where you can download each days paper on to your PSP in the morning :)
This is particularly interesting because I work for a contract development shop that has been contracted to create something of a social networking/citizen journalism type site out of newspaper sites. Imagine promoting your blog and getting so much interest that what you have blogged about and the articles you have written are published in a bi-weekly periodical. Some of our sample sites can be found at Bakotopia, Northwest Voice, and Southwest Voice. In fact, this technology has become so popular that we've won an EDGIE for Most Innovative Visitor Participation (project manager's blog) I think we've taken the idea of blogs and set it to a higher level. Before, people kept coming back to sites because they wanted to read the latest blog entry (which is why I always come back to Slashdot), and now, user's come back to do that, and make their own posts, etc. It's like the draw of MySpace, with the promise of one day becoming a "freelance journalist" for the paper. I think it's a great idea, with a promising future.
FTA: Rupert Murdoch has stated that the 'newspaper industry needs to embrace the technological revolution of the Internet, MP3 players, laptops and mobile phones or face extinction.'"
...I..agree..with...Rupert Murdoch? Repent! Repent! It's a sign of the end times!
They still print papers?
You want more human interest stories?
Human interest = synonym for pointless fluffy page filler, is what I thought.
I'd love news stories that weren't dumbed down, although it'd be a chore to read more than a couple a day. They should look at academic conference proceedings (kind of science-paper-lite) as their model, and publish yearly books of essential background knowledge to allow us to understand the stories (online, just link to the relevant chapter).
p.s. did you know that the writing target (in terms of vocab and complexity) for newspapers is a 14 year old?
"Die Murdoch Media"
I couldn't agree more!
It's impossible to say newspapers are going to drop off the face of the planet. There are a couple of main reasons why the consideration to necessarily adapt to these new technologies is ridiculous.
(1) People should not be listening to tycoons who don't give a damn about the industry. Murdoch is telling people to blow money into new tech, when newspapers just need to stick to their guns. Good newspapers really need to do one thing: produce good content. Instead of trying to figure out podcasting and instant feedback and 10,000 ways to produce for the mobile Web, these organizations should stick to journalism. Break the story, update it, and follow through. If the story can be told several ways, tell them through these venues when appropriate. There's no reason to go crazy with figuring out all of these new things to do at the same time.
(2) Most importantly, local coverage has been completely ignored, and it's probably the most significant weapon a local newspaper has in its arsenal. With the slight caveat of http://newsvine.com/, newspapers have inherent control of their local area. Nobody can tell a story better than they can in their town. A good city paper will beat out the NYT bureau in that city almost every day. When a smart newspaper understands this, it can find revenue from these streams. Obviously no newspaper Web site is going to try to charge for national and international stories, but the local coverage is worth something that you can't buy from many other places.
Really, newspapers will need to strike a balance of what the community needs. Large news organizations can fill the niche of on-demand content. Newspapers need to reach deep and understand their core.
Craig's List is almost single handedly killing the local newspapers. Local papers can't afford to lose their classifieds revenue. But it's happening. They either adapt or die.
Be heard || Be herd
Even the NYT reads like the USA Today.
Actually, the NYT, nowdays, reads like a political version of the Weekly World News.
NYT HEADLINE: Bat Boy Has WMD!
1 is the square root of all evil.
Newspaper sales are declining, Internet use is rising. As a future librarian (got my MLS this December 2005) I've had to look over the steadfastness of print on the onslaught of information explosion that's occuring.
1 0reasonswhy.htm
Pros: portable, readable, accessible, and as long as no serious floods occur it has a greater chance of surviving than most digital media storage formats. of course someone had a comment on the quality of paper now a days and it's fairly true. But this mainly applies to print in general.
Cons: limited search capabilities, prone to damage, and very difficult to store (which is why a majority of papers are stored on to microfiche at your local public library)
truth is we're just waiting around till technology catches up with the pros.
http://www.ala.org/ala/alonline/selectedarticles/
while the arguments here do not necessarily translate over to this argument, they do contain several valid points about print versus digital works.
This guy is blowing smoke, there's no huge impending rush in even the next decade for newspapers to significantly change their business models. readership is down because there are far more distractions; tv, internet, games, etc...
Even IF they change, it's possible people will have so many distractions it won't make a difference. I see things becoming really bad in terms of our future's intellectual capabilities if we as the next generation don't set some serious examples for future generations to come.
A relative of mine insists there's no need for newspapers (and of course scoffs at the need for public libraries) while he can find everything he needs online. Naturally he's not a reader because the last time he wrote me something was about the "OS X" hack contest which turned out to be a farce in bad reporting.
Having worked in the public library for a little while, there is a huge need for both Internet terminals AND periodicals.
While I'm an Internet savvy person(I was an IT person before deciding to go the librarian route which required going back to school for a Master's in Library Science) I am a voracious reader of both print and digital works. (I even listen to books on cds while driving). I'd have to say I STILL read more things in print than I ever could of digital, because the very fact remains, I like reading a newspaper. You'll find others do too if you venture out of your circles.
Rubbish. Bring back the old fashioned hot metal type. In the days when it was widely used, people used to READ newspapers, not just look at page 3. (And we used to walk to school in th' snow wi'out shoes, an' it were uphill BOTH ways.)
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
whose industry is trying to cling to an outdated distribution model, trying hard to ignore the internet as a medium to distribute content? The very same industry that tries to buy laws to prevent this from happening? The same industry that tries hard to outlaw ad-skipping procedures and force us to view what we don't want to?
Calling the kettle black, Mr. Murdoch?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Those who adapt new technology are facing extinction.
Don't you see whats happening, and who gets to spread their seeds?
Its certainly not the most technology aware population.
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
well considering most people have developed a pretty full grasp of the english language by 14, then that's not too bad a thing really. Well at least when I was 14 I read a lot more than I do now.
which is totally what she said
Who moved my cheese?
As long as we all have to go drop a deuce, print media will stay with us. I mean, you wouldn't fold up a laptop and leave it in the stall for the next guy to use, would ya?
Most national papers are at about the 8th grade reading level, local papers have even a lower level. This is what they aim for. I'm not aware of any papers that are actually targeted at people who are smart.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I never thought I'd hear myself say that. As the head of a media conglomerate which could be seen as part of the problem (cookie cutter content, ratings over hard news, sensationalism over journalism, etc., etc., ad nauseam), he's completely and totally correct. The prime plaintiffs in recent intellectual property skirmishes (RIAA, MPAA) simply fail to realize that the market is changing and people want pliability in media type without paying two and three times for the same content. Since the business model is one of repackaging and resale of old product, obviously the plaintiffs are going to fight this sort of pliability tooth and nail, hiding behind the great oak of outdated copyright precedent for as long as the tree still stands.
Of course, inertia is the prime offender in this case, and too many people make too much cash over the current system of production and distribution. Too many people are employed in positions which contribute nothing material to the product itself, too many industries are set up around the distribution of product. And that's what these associations fear, that even though the producers of product could eliminate a great amount of the cost of delivering product to the consumer simply by changing the distribution model, the distribution chain employs so many people and so many are taking a cut that resistance is primarily being pushed from that area.
Of course, I do disagree about print media. There's just something comforting about grabbing breakfast at the local diner and sitting down with a paper. That's just me, I guess.
I dont think you have to be 'smart' to get the news.. natural disaster here, murder here, rape here, politicians make fun of each other here :/ I dont particularly want to read the news since most of it is either sickening (murder/rape) or irrelevant (politics) for the most part to my life. I'm not sure where the natural disasters fit in, but the only thing I could do about that would be donate money for relief (which a countries government should be doing, if the world were a perfect place, and governments worked). Maybe that's being selfish, but for 'interesting' news then I come to places like Slashdot that are more targeted. The news is mostly for the mainstream, where you have to cater for the lowest common denominator.
which is totally what she said
I was bored in an airport and picked up a copy of the Wall Street Journal out of curiosity. I was surprised to find out that it was as good as I'd heard. Expect a decidedly pro-Capitalism bent to the financial stories, of course, but the international coverage was really comprehensive.
The Christian Science Monitor is also very well regarded, but it's weekly instead of daily, and I can't personally vouch for it.
If you want daily local news, though, then I suggest you buy a police scanner and attend town hall meetings - I haven't lived anywhere with decent local reporting in years. An alternative would be to hire a bum as your own personal roving reporter. The writing might not be so hot, but it'd probably be cheaper than buying a local paper and definitely much more interesting.
I think I'll name my hobo Bernstein.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?