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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.'"
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.
If I'm not mistaken, the guy who said this is CEO (or president or something) of News Corp (owns Fox and whatnot), so I think his word should be quite influential to the other broadcasting companies like Time Warner, Turner Broadcasting, Disney, etc.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
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
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.
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).
I believe that newspapers in general have adapted to many new trends in the last decade and that it did more harm than benefit in most cases. IMO the problem for publishers is that they fail to convince young people that they might be better off with a traditional newspaper subscribtion than 20 RSS feeds from various souces. I use both sources and I'm quite often disappointed by the lack of background commentary and information of reputable sites like the bbc or faz.net (the latter is a German site). My guess is that most traditional newspapers and TV networks try to tie new customers to their original services without providing too much information online. This might be contemporary problem and I will cancel my newspaper subscription the moment I believe that there's better information available online. But I'm not in need of a more flashy version of the mediocre online content I'm reading occasionally.
On the other hand we're talking about Rupert Murdoch here, so there's no new need to complain about a lack of vision (we could discuss how this lack results in high mass circulation afterall, but this is a different topic)
I don't read replies by ACs.
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?
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."
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.
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.
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."
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?
Greasy fingers and the occasional spilled Coke are far more hazardous to computers, PDAs, etc. than they are to newspapers. I have a Treo 650 and sometimes read news on it if I have nothing else to do, but if I'm out to lunch, I'd rather read the paper than get my phone all gunked up.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.