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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.'"
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...
wtf is up with these "--------------- or die" analogies. Fuck you, fuck death. I'll just sit back and watch.
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.
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.
Which is why traditional channels are still alive. Mostly because of the lack of a great unification of distribution standards. HTML is about as good as it gets, and there's a bit of variation there - javascript, XML, XHTML, DHTML, etc. If you want to be sure to reach everyone, including those kids the UN is providing $100 laptops to, you're probably going to have to be readable in HTML 3.2 or sommat. Then there's audio and video content. Not quite any one standard, though probably the one company which is making a serious charge in that direction is the one lease expected a couple years ago, Apple.
All things considered, there is obvious importance in staying up to date with technological trends.
Ye Gods! Are you a pundit? You sound just like one!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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
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
Must be past the end of the Paper Boy Era.
When I was in my late teens I inherited my older brother's paper route. It was somewhere about 65 customers. As this was my main source of income I took a particularly aggressive view towards growing and maintaining the route. In 3.3 years I had it up to 150+ customers, much to the annoyance of paper boys of neighbouring routes. My parents always sent me out with our paper, just in case I saw someone moving into a new house -- I'd introduce myself and give them the paper free and ask if I could sign them up. I was breaking my back, but I was also raking in some decent cash for a highschool kid. I made certain papers weren't left in wet or could be blown away or anything. When I retired and left for college the newspaper said it was too large a route for any one carrier and split it.
Now people drive past and chuck papers in the general vicinity of doors. I know what you mean.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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 can wait for a site to load, I just go take a bath or something; and it's there when I get back. For downloading cds, I can just wge-aaaagggh.
[no carrier]
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?
...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
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.
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.
Interesting. I find that most of the online newspapers I read only make a few key headline articles available, not the entire content.
Besides, I hate dragging a 19" monitor with me to lunch, and people keep tripping on the cables... :)
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
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.
"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!"
Actually, XHTML should work best for those kids with $100 laptops. Since it's well-formed XML, parsing it is very straightforward and efficient, and since those laptops would be running open-source software, they'll certainly be able to parse XHTML.
Perhaps more by luck than chance, he found that if he could lever up the rock and place cylindrical logs under it, he could move it...
Some time later, another bloke less pre-disposed to living in a cave, decided to create circular discs, probably of wood, that could be placed in each corner of a heavy object by connecting them in order to move it easier - and so it was that "the wheel" was born...
And as we leap forward through the millenia to our present day, we see that the concept of the wheel remains fundamentally unchanged - it's still circular, probably has an axle and is best used in numbers of four or more.
The wheel, and numerous other technological developments over the centuries, serve to demonstrate that some inventions can be pretty much designed correctly from the time of their inception without the "need" to replace it completely purely for the purposes of technical advancement.
Besides, as the owner of "The Sun" newspaper in Britain, a journal aimed specifically at those modern-day individuals who are pre-disposed to cavemanhood & writing with crayons, can I suggest that you, sir, are a complete and utter gobshite who is totally out of his depth and has far too much money for his own good.
In summary, therefore, may I suggest that you continue publishing stories about "Lesbian Vicars" for those knucklescrapers who continue to find amusement for their unicellular brains in your newspaper & leave those of us who are more pre-disposed to understanding technology to make decisions about whether we still want paper newspapers or not.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
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!
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.
For more information, click here.
Rupert Murdoch has said a lot of memorable things, among them, "Silence! Sieze them!"
Limina.Log
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.
Apparently what newspapers are really missing are:
* Bold, primary colors to inform Americans how to feel about "the issues"
* Big, moving, symbolic images and lines
* Stirring music
The real problem is that newspapers are still caught up in that "facts" fad..which totally puts their necks out on the line. What if they get a fact wrong? That would prove them "uncredible" - instead, what they should be doing is telling people what to think about topics in a way that is not legally binding!
Presenting facts and statistics is too complicated for the modern enlightened viewer. They need graphics!!
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.
With respect: Spoken like someone who probably never ventured far from suburbia--who only *thinks* he knows what "flyover country" is like.
Technology is embraced with open arms by "rural people" my friend. Not only do they all have 24/7 telephones, they were early-adopters of satellite television and broadband internet (over their satellite dishes, a la "Starband").
And H*ll, most of 'em even have 'lectricity and wear SHOES, if you can believe it.
Sheesh.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
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."
Ah, how I wish there was a "Pedantic Shmuck -1" mod tag.
Actually, that should be "... how I wish there were a...." It's the hypothetical subjunctive.
Look at it this way: if they ever implement such a tag, you'll have someone on whom to test it (whew! I almost ended my sentence with a preposition!).
FTA: 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.'"
...I..agree..with...Rupert Murdoch? Repent! Repent! It's a sign of the end times!
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.