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.'"

Comments

Re:I'm kinda afraid of this.

[AnotherDaveB]

The only one that comes to mind is "The Economist" (they state quite often that they are "a conservative newspaper.").

Disclaimer - I subscribe to The Economist's online edition, and I think it's a very good publication. (The FT's probably better.:) )

If by 'conservative' you mean ' [USA] conservative republican', I think you're mistaken. The Economist is primarily a 'free trade' supporter. That very often leads to common cause with the political right, but the allegiance is to 'free trade'

Another Disclaimer - I let my print subscription to The Economist lapse during the early part of President GW Bush's first term as US President as I thought they had lost sight of this, and their USA coverage was offering fawning paeans to the White House, rather than the [wry] analysis I was paying for.

The quote below is taken from The Economist's website, so it's their philosophy in their own words.

What, besides free trade and free markets, does The Economist believe in? "It is to the Radicals that The Economist still likes to think of itself as belonging. The extreme centre is the paper's historical position." That is as true today as when Crowther said it in 1955. The Economist considers itself the enemy of privilege, pomposity and predictability. It has backed conservatives such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. It has supported the Americans in Vietnam. But it has also endorsed Harold Wilson and Bill Clinton, and espoused a variety of liberal causes: opposing capital punishment from its earliest days, while favouring penal reform and decolonisation, as well as--more recently--gun control and gay marriage.

Lastly, The Economist believes in plain language. Walter Bagehot, our most famous 19th-century editor, tried "to be conversational, to put things in the most direct and picturesque manner, as people would talk to each other in common speech, to remember and use expressive colloquialisms". That remains the style of the paper today.

Established in 1843 to campaign on one of the great political issues of the day, The Economist remains, in the second half of its second century, true to the principles of its founder. James Wilson, a hat maker from the small Scottish town of Hawick, believed in free trade, internationalism and minimum interference by government, especially in the affairs of the market. Though the protectionist Corn Laws which inspired Wilson to start The Economist were repealed in 1846, the newspaper has lived on, never abandoning its commitment to the classical 19th-century Liberal ideas of its founder.

The Corn Laws, which by taxing and restricting imports of corn made bread expensive and starvation common, were bad for Britain. Free trade, in Wilson's view, was good for everyone. In his prospectus for The Economist, he wrote: "If we look abroad, we see within the range of our commercial intercourse whole islands and continents, on which the light of civilisation has scarce yet dawned; and we seriously believe that free trade, free intercourse, will do more than any other visible agent to extend civilisation and morality throughout the world - yes, to extinguish slavery itself."

Wilson's outlook was, therefore, moral, even civilising, but not moralistic. He believed "that reason is given to us to sit in judgment over the dictates of our feelings." Reason convinced him in particular that Adam Smith was right, that through its invisible hand the market benefited profit-seeking individuals (of whom he was one) and society alike. He was himself a manufacturer and wanted especially to influence "men of business". Accordingly, he insisted that all the arguments and propositions put forward in his paper should be subjected to the test of facts. That was why it was called The Economist.

Re:And Then

[iamlucky13]

Edison supposedly screwed Tesla over on some patent, but I believe it was actually Westinghouse that Edison was trash-talking on AC vs DC. Brilliant intuition, but he could've used a little more education. I wouldn't dignify this Murdock guy by comparing him to Edison, though. Murdock doesn't have 1100 patents, for one.

Re:Newspapers are dying anyway

[generic-man]

Few "newspaper companies" are purely in the newspaper business. For years they've branched out with radio stations, TV stations, web sites, direct mailing, telemarketing, and any other medium that will get them sales and exposure. Example: The New York Times Company owns 19 newspapers, 9 TV stations, a significant stake in the Boston Red Sox, and more.

Re:And Then

[kfg]

I believe it was actually Westinghouse that Edison was trash-talking on AC vs DC.

Tesla worked for Edison, but left him to work for Westinghouse. Our entire system of electrical power generation and distribution is pretty much the work of a single mind. Tesla's.

A complaint was lodged at the time that Tesla had left nothing for anyone else to do, although Steinmetz managed to come up with a trick or two.

And speaking of Steinmetz:

Murdock doesn't have 1100 patents, for one.

Neither did Edison, really. His company did. People like Tesla and Steinmetz did most of the real inventing and Edison tacked his name onto the patent application. It was work for hire, just as it is today when working for GE.

And Murdock is talking about publishing, which is, like, his field and shit. Until recently they didn't even give patents for things like "a method for arrangeing text in columns."

KFG