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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.'
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.
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.
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.