Adapt to New Technology or Die 196
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.'"
Analog data distribution is dead... (Score:1, Insightful)
And Then (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Facing Extinction... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm kinda afraid of this. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.").
Re:Analog data distribution is dead... (Score:3, Insightful)
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!
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
ridiculous (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:The Google Way (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:And Then (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, but remember, this guy made his fortune before the internet came along.
Remember Edison talking trash against Tesla? Calling Alternating Current the Devil's something-or-other? Edison was already a success, but felt certain Direct Current was the way to the future. Bugger all the great inventor know about resistance.
I'm not saying he's an idiot, I just think he's waxing enthusiastic on a technology he really doesn't understand, even after 6 or more years. Some companies do well in it and others founder.
I like the internet for instant news, but would I pay for it? No. There's too many free outlets.
Do I click on ads? Once in a while, but most of them are rubbish or things I have no interest in anyway. Perhaps better linking stories to advertising would serve them better. If I'm reading about death in a car bombing I don't think I'm going to be in a mood to look at the new Fords.
Sorry Rupert... (Score:5, Insightful)
Until those problems in technology are solved, I'm sorry Rupert, newspapers will not die.
Someone forward the message... (Score:4, Insightful)
Embracing the Internet (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Analog data distribution is dead... (Score:1, Insightful)
You think so, do you?
Pop quiz! What is the most reliable method for data storage?
Hard Drive? Hardly... Mean time to failure is only a couple of years.
CD/DVD? No. The media degrades (surface oxidizes, etc) and becomes unreliable in less than a decade.
Magnetic tape? Again, no. More reliable than discs, but has a life expectency only on the order of decades.
Paper? Ah, now we're talking. Quality, heavy bond, acid-free paper will last longer than any of the media listed above. Not to mention that it's free of any physical and non-physical compatibility issues (can we rely on PDF, say, to be supported 200, or even 20, years from now?)
The general rule of thumb for data storage is this: the more primitive the technology, the more reliable it is.
I once went to a conference where they asked if the proceedings should be DVD-only in future years. The almost unanimous response was NO. Because we wanted a reliable, hassle-free method of reading them 20 years down the line.
Would you really want your newspaper-of-record to be stored on a medium that has a life expectency of less than ten years?
"A new generation of media consumers..." (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Re:Analog data distribution is dead... (Score:2, Insightful)
"24" On Demand? (Score:5, Insightful)
The hidden meaning in Rupert's words. (Score:3, Insightful)
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!
Newspapers have adapted - in the wrong direction (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Not Everyone Has A Computer (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Both aspects would be nice (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Not just newspapers (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:The Google Way (Score:3, Insightful)
The reader isn't the consumer of traditional advertising-supported publishing; the advertiser is the consumer. The reader -- more specifically, his or her fertile mental landscape, ripe for insemination with the appropriate ideas, generally about what would be a good idea to buy -- is the product.
If newspapers competed for readers, then things like "more knowledge, entertained" and the like would have been what newspapers were competing over these past few decades. Instead, they've been competing for advertisers, with readers as an ornery but ultimately pliable herd population to be corralled. Most of the losing that the newspapers have been doing to the intarweb isn't because of "competition" as such; plenty of people read papers in situations where they just don't have access to the internet. They're losing because their model depends on having a monopoly on truth, and they're losing it. No revolution of interactiveness is necessary for them to stop hemmoraging readers. They just need to stop telling lies (particularly to stop republishing government/industry press releases as if they were truth). TV could stand to learn this lesson, too.
An alternative would be to muzzle the internet, so that they'll get back the monopoly on truth again.
With So Many Like My Wife... (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Re:I'm kinda afraid of this. (Score:4, Insightful)
My sig says "evil is as evil does". I don't care what the economists says they are about, I don't care they profess to believe in, I don't care what they see when look in the mirror. I only care about what they say and do. From where I sit the economist has been the biggest cheerleader for this war in the world. To me advocating a war and making excuses for GW is not about free trade. If anything it's the opposite of free trade, it's waging war to invade and occupy a nation and taking control of their natural resources.
Everybody has a distorted perception of themselves. GW thinks he is a god loving man who is obeying gods will, I think I handsome and debonair, the economist thinks it's an independent voice which cares about free trade. None of those things are true though.
Re:And Then (Score:3, Insightful)
The additional ability is taking that knowledge and being able to generate an income from it. Buying what appears to be, temporarily hot Internet players has more often proven to be a waste of money rather than being a positive new addition to an existing company.
The big thing is to lead in the winning new technologies, rather than having to catch up, like the battle a lot of old media companies have to face to catch up in search advertising. Getting a step ahead in the new content search model and new hardware combinations for the delivery and redistribution of content is the means by which companies can regain their prior advantage.
People often forget that the bulk of modern 20nth century media was about selling advertising space and the content was just a vehicle for it's delivery, there are ways of taking the model into the 21st century but for most they are just not apparent. Making those methods become apparent for the rest to follow, is the difference between winning and losing.