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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!
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
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
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.
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
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.