Murdoch: The Future Of Newspapers Goes Beyond Dead Trees
Rupert Murdoch, the chairman and chief executive of News Corp., gave a speech on Sunday titled "The Future of Newspapers: Moving Beyond Dead Trees." In the speech, he made the bold statement that newspapers would always be around in some form or other. "Too many journalists seem to take a perverse pleasure in ruminating on their pending demise," he said. "Unlike the doom and gloomers, I believe that newspapers will reach new heights in the 21st century."
The speech, recorded in the United States and relayed nationally by the Australian Broadcasting Corp., was the latest in an annual ABC series of lectures by a prominent Australian.
Murdoch, who grew a small city newspaper into a media conglomerate that now includes 20th Century Fox, Fox News Channel and Sky Broadcasting, Dow Jones & Co. and the social network, MySpace, knows a little something about the media industry.
He doesn't believe that the internet will be the death of newspapers at all - it will only transform them. He called the doomsayers who predict the Internet killing off newspapers "misguided cynics who are too busy writing their own obituary to be excited by the opportunity." He believes they are missing the fact that the online world is really just a huge new market ready to be tapped. And it's filled with news-craving consumers. People now are "hungrier for information that ever before," he said. "Readers want what they've always wanted: a source they can trust. That has always been the role of great newspapers in the past. And that role will make newspapers great in the future."
The news of the future may not come in the printed paper format anymore, Murdoch admits. In the coming decades, he too expects some newspapers to lose circulation. But as those numbers die down, others will increase. Online news sources will grow and grow. The circulation gains he expects will be not only through web pages and RSS feeds, but also email that delivers customized news and ads to our mobile devices.
"In this coming century, the form of delivery may change, but the potential audience for our content will multiply many times over," he said.
But what will this new online model for information delivery look like? Murdoch mentioned The Times of London and The Wall Street Journal, both papers he owns, as examples of those that managed to obtain large, online readerships. With the WSJ specifically, Murdoch made note of its plans to offer three tiers of online content: free news, a subscriber-level service, and a third "premium service" of reader-customizable "high-end financial news and analysis."
Will this tiered content model fit all, though? We think it may be too soon to tell. We're already seeing other initiatives to help "save journalism" arise that use a new crowd-funded model where micro-donations sent in through the internet help pay the reporter's salary.
Two such experiments in crowdfunding are Spot.us and Representative Journalism, both which are testing this concept at the local level. Spot.us allows freelance journalists to pitch story ideas and get funding from the public in the San Franciso Bay Area, and Representative Journalism (or RepJ) is running a test in Northfield, Minn., funding one full-time journalist to cover that community.
Meanwhile, we're seeing papers in our hometowns shift coverage locally to combat the online threats. What once was a throwaway community circular is now being revived as a lightweight way to ingest your local news. That model may succeed as well.
What's more, the internet may allow for more than one business model to succeed here. However, only time will tell which ones really work best.
Comments
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I do agree that newspapers will still be around for the foreseeable future; they will just change distribution channels to web/online instead of paper. There will be a lot of reorganization to make them profitable, but we still need these beacons to navigate the world of information, combined with blogs and other informal channels.
I wrote some other thoughts in this post: http://cli.gs/Xvm63P
Posted by: Jorge Escobar
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November 18, 2008 6:52 AM
I'm glad that he accepted giving this series of lectures.
For those who wish to grab the audio from his talks, you can get the mp3s here: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/boyerlectures/
Posted by: grah! | November 18, 2008 7:54 AM
Murdoch says "The news of the future may not come in the printed paper format anymore..." I think he is just playing with words. He will have industry leading "News Sources" like the Wall Street Journal but they will be distributed in pure electronic formats. Books will never go away IMHO but newspapers probably will not have the circulation they need to sustain operations to print on paper for a profit. So newspapers will go away.
Posted by: Harvey | November 18, 2008 9:03 AM
Cool! Spanish biblical spam. First time I've seen that...
Circulated newspapers will eventually go away completely, in favor of a digital format. I find it hard to believe that the web will replace their previously huge revenue streams. The biggest thing that has killed the papers is the decline of classifieds, thanks to Craigslist and other free versions. But newspapers continue their dangerous dependence on classifieds.
This addiction is understandable, given the high margins associated with this type of revenue, but it is also their Achilles heel. Print classifieds are notoriously vulnerable to online competition, and as that pond dries up, up-sells evaporate with it.
Posted by: Steve | November 18, 2008 10:45 AM
I will 100% agree with Murdoch Internet Can't replace newspapers ,the daily routine of any person is wakeup and reading newspaper with a cup of coffee,not opening Internet and watching the news ,this is my personal opinion only.
Posted by: venkat | November 18, 2008 8:10 PM
I agree with Mr. Murdoch. Every change is an opportunity as well as threat. There will be more news.
But it does not mean newspaper companies will do well. In any innovation-driven change, more incumbent firms die (or get weaker) than prosper. The advent of the digital camera hurt traditional analog camera and film companies, and Canon is probably the only company that took advantage of the change.
With his insights, it seems his newspapers are more likely to belong to the survivors. But we'll see.
One very important thing is that the change in 'channel' almost always brings change in 'production'. The newspaper production model has been optimized for tradtional news 'paper' distribution. Now, it needs better model for Internet. Newspaper companies cannot just add web channels and expect to do well. They need to rethink the whole of their business model.
Posted by: Slowblogger | November 18, 2008 9:18 PM
Once you lose our trust, you will have a hard time getting it back if you can. Fox news may have started the downslide of propaganda and being bribed to give us fake news, but they didnt do it by themselves. Consolididation into 5 people hands ruined the media.. 8 years of coverups is enough..
Posted by: bay | November 19, 2008 2:43 PM
Once you lose our trust, you will have a hard time getting it back if you can. Fox news may have started the downslide of propaganda and being bribed to give us fake news, but they didnt do it by themselves. Consolididation into 5 people hands ruined the media.. 8 years of coverups is enough..
Posted by: bay | November 19, 2008 2:44 PM
They need to rethink the whole of their business model.
Posted by: mirc | November 24, 2008 4:53 AM