by Derek Morrison, 1 September 2009
One of my areas of interest is what is happening to the newspaper industry and how, and if, they manage to get out of the nose dive to extinction they currently appear to be in. There’s a lot written about this phenomenon of the digital age but I found Dominic Rushe’s article That’s all folks! See you online (Sunday Times, 23 August 2009) neatly encapsulated many of the of the issues. I was intrigued that the Ann Arbor News had pre-emptively moved online rather than close down completely; the assumption being that is where all the eyeballs have moved to. My view is that moving online will be insufficient and is anyway a moving target. After all, today’s Facebook may be tomorrow’s Alta Vista (remember that?). One thing the Rushe article did highlight was that “a new generation is growing up that appears to have no affinity for printed newspapers” and maybe no newspapers at all. The article also states:
“We have to recognise that when you go into a coffee shop, people are reading newspapers on their laptops”.
That may be true but I can’t believe that there is a long-term business model in that observation. That’s at best and intermediate experience for the highly motivated willing to put up with the constraints of the reading/viewing experience on a laptop. A mass quality reading experience awaits better devices than a laptop or an iPhone. And there is the rub, newspapers have been heading online for some time but it really needs a generation of ubiquitous mobile devices more suited to the format; either that or a radical design of the format that are either more than abstracts or PDFs; the latter make for an uncomfortable readiing experience in an ebook reader. But Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation is not waiting. It plans to start charging for digital content and that will be the true test of loyalty to the medium.
For me, reading a newspaper on a computer (laptop or not) is not what I want to do as an everyday experience on the 0710 train to London Paddington even when I’m not expected to pay for the content so I’m certainly not going to do it if I am paying for it. I would, however, pay up if the reading experience and convenience was as good as or preferably better than that offered by the paper medium.
But there’s a long way to go before e-readers offer as satisfying or exceed the paper reading experience. So the problem is that many of these newspapers and their staff may not be around when the technology finally catches up with what is required to support a mass audience; the premium paying early adopters and gadget geeks will just not be enough . That’s the irony, internet technology is good enough to damage the newspaper business model but not yet good enough to offer a viable alternative in the way an MP3 or other media player can for audio and video.
And what if, as the Rushe article indicates, the current and future generation of digital natives never acquires that newspaper/book habit? In that case there will still be a disconnect between what the technologies can then do and what people then want to do. Consequently, the pockets of the survivors of the big media cull that is now taking place may need to have deep enough pockets to regenerate more than a superficial news reading habit in future generations; and that may require long term investments. Ironically, that may also help to create the conditions for the emergence both new generations and new forms of journalism not dependent on either the infrastructure or approval of the ‘deep pockets’. If that scenario comes to pass our current blogs, wikis, twitters, facebooks, myspaces are just a primitive early evolutionary stage in a considerably more complex and rich information ecosystem. Unless of course the ‘deep pockets’ view such potential richness as their landscape with everything else to be consigned to virtual ‘reservations’ or the equivalent of citizen band radio.
Postscript
After writing the above piece I came across Post-Newspaper Journalism? (On the Media, 21 August 2009, transcript or MP3 download). Indeed the complete On the Media, newspaper category is a worthy resource for media mavens.
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They’re coming to take your content away! (Auricle, 21 August 2009)
