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

The Google Way

[RunFatBoy.net]

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.

Re:And Then

[jZnat]

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.

Re:Analog data distribution is dead...

[nbert]

Clearly, analog data distribution is dead. On the digital side, the importance lies in the method of distribution.

If this is the case there is no reason to keep publishing newspapers at all, right?

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)