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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...
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.
Adapt to new anologies or die!
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
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 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.
Adapt to new anologies or die!
Adapt to new spelling or die!
(Sorry)
...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.
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.
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
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.
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.