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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...
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.
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
A big problem the newspapers will face online is that they no longer gain any power from their physical distribution networks. Everything will be defined by the content itself. It used to be if you wanted the paper delivered daily, you had to get A.) the local paper or B.) some big paper like the NY Times or USA Today. Now you can get any paper in the entire world daily and all for the same price (some for free). So which will you choose? You will read the one with the best or most relevant content.
...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.
...To the RIAA/MPAA
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.
"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!"
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
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!
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.
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.
The reader isn't the consumer of traditional advertising-supported publishing; the advertiser is the consumer. The reader -- more specifically, his or her fertile mental landscape, ripe for insemination with the appropriate ideas, generally about what would be a good idea to buy -- is the product.
If newspapers competed for readers, then things like "more knowledge, entertained" and the like would have been what newspapers were competing over these past few decades. Instead, they've been competing for advertisers, with readers as an ornery but ultimately pliable herd population to be corralled. Most of the losing that the newspapers have been doing to the intarweb isn't because of "competition" as such; plenty of people read papers in situations where they just don't have access to the internet. They're losing because their model depends on having a monopoly on truth, and they're losing it. No revolution of interactiveness is necessary for them to stop hemmoraging readers. They just need to stop telling lies (particularly to stop republishing government/industry press releases as if they were truth). TV could stand to learn this lesson, too.
An alternative would be to muzzle the internet, so that they'll get back the monopoly on truth again.
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.