The Old Media Is Dead. Long Live the Old Media!

I am checking researches in our country (Slovenia) and this year there was first significant drop of printed media, but I agree with conclusion that print will not die. It will fall, never die. Drinking cofee and reading newspaper is still common and nice start of the working day for a lot of people. Before attaching to the computer monitor for hours, it's nice to have some old school, habbit, beeing more human.

Last week I got some new free magazine with the mail and I was surprised. Someone start to publish news about local internet achivement, new sites, services, interviews and we got new local Blog magazine.

Print and internet is interacting good, what we cannot say for TV. It's not that friendly with the internet.

Regards,
Igor

I read the NYTimes every morning with my cup of coffee -- but i read the online edition. I can jump around/surf/factcheck and correlate right there, and get a more complete picture.

When radio came about and people anticipated the loss of sheet music, they were right! Before radio, most people could read and play music, now, this amounts to popping in a CD, tuning in to MTV/or itunes, or playing guitar hero.

Change is gradual, but it IS happening. Daily print media will disappear: what will remain will be on flexible book-like kindle, but more generic.

If you want buggy whips or printed media, you will have to move the third world...as long as they exist.

Yes, new media and old media make a charming duo.  What is really interesting, though, is how the Internet will shape how we interact with news in the coming years.

Google News could bump it up a notch in intrigue if they used an additional Google function- Google translate.  This paired with Google's stellar search engine could create a feature allowing you to compare articles on the same topic from around the globe.

For example, if you were reading an article about Myanmar, you could link to any news article in the world and have it instantly translated for you. You can do this manually by typing the domain directly into Google's translate site, such as I have done with this Saudi Arabian newspaper here.  But if news articles were paired with direct links, it would be easier to read more on the same subject from viewpoints as varied as; Fox, Al-Jazeera and the China's People Daily.  Admittedly some of the text is cumbersome but better than you might expect from a computer generated translation.

I would even suggest that Google take this a step further with Google books, allowing users to cross-reference information from differing historical accounts over the same event.  Imagine comparing Japanese and Chinese text books for content on the Nanjing massacre or comparing Pakistani and Indian texts on the events of 1947. 

 

fun, fun, fun,

Elisa 

Yehudi,

I'm sure you recognize this old adage, "Content is King." These days, it should be revised to "Quality Content is King."

If newspapers are going to die...it will be a slow death. It's the quality content--versus the most stimulating--that will draw the faithful, no matter where it shows up...in old media or new.

I found an interesting article on the subject. The Quality Gap: The Race for Context Pushes Content Quality to the Sidelines by John Blossom, who talks about where quality content fits in.

In the intro by Robin Hood, she says, “While traditional business analysts pick holes in social media and new media points fingers at the flaws in mainstream online publishing, standards for content are dropping across the board.”

James

I'm afraid newspapers are using the same argument Clayton Christensen exposed in Innovator's Dilemma. As a business in any industry starts losing customers to competition, after the first panic, they start rationalizing that those are the least profitable, so shedding them means the profit margins on the remainder go up -- and glory be! the reported satisfaction level and loyalty of the remaining customers goes up. But -- the competition, which is so cheap that it can peel away a few customers even if it's not as "good" in the way the incumbent has always measured quality -- starts getting better. And it starts peeling off more and more customers, from the bottom up, which continues to have the effect of raising the average profit margin of the remaining customers. Think about transistors and vacuum tubes. At first transistors produced terrible sound. But they were cheap, and they offered new virtues that became appealing over the old hi-fi: portability, for instance. Gradually, they improved, so the vacuum tube people now are, yes, fantastically profitable -- but an almost invisibly small industry.

What new media and more content does is help sort the wheat from the chaff, that's all. No more room for lazy TV producers and useless writers. They will end up stacking shelves. Rubbish content will exist on some server somewhere, but just because it exists doesn't mean someone will read/watch/listen to it.  

And tech breakthroughs aren't the be all and end all. You can get excited by a new technology, but that excitement doesn't last long if the applications or content that run on top aren't interesting/compelling etc. Example - being able to choose the camera angle when watching live sports. Who chooses the one that's different from the director? Plus, people are lazy. Let someone else do the work, make the decisions. 

And online TV - yes, we will all take a look and play with the features and stuff, but if the content sucks we won't watch it. Unless we are really dumb (maybe I shouldn't discount that factor...)

If blogs are boring, only the people that write them will read them and think how interesting they are. You know who you are...

Newspapers will die if they are useless and irrelevant and that's all down to the content. If it's a great read, and, like the Guardian in the U.K., makes use of great color reproduction and VERY LARGE photographs that have a visual impact that online materials don't currnetly have (given the average screen size of PCs etc), then they will survive and generate revenues.

There are still only seven days in a week and 24 hours in a day -- people will be drawn to the most stimulating experience they can find, be it TV, online, print, audio (radio is till big, yes?) -- there is a positive correlation between atrractive (not necessarily great) content and success. End of.

You're right that there'll always be a demand for expertise and analysis. I just don't think the media industry does a great job at supplying those, and the popularity of blogs shows that a large number of readers/viewers feel the same way.  It doesn't matter if their reasons for distrusting the news are sometimes contradictory, or even whether they're right or wrong. The end result is a declining audience for professional media.

This is most apparent in coverage of US politics, but the same thing applies to specialist technical media. Wikipedia is already hurting textbook sales, and improved technology will help amateurs compete in entertainment too. If paper ever gives way to the iPad (a cheap and lightweight Tablet PC), novelists and publishers will be competing with people who give their work away for free. Low cost video technology will lead to a surge in community produced TV shows and movies.

I think the big question for media companies and workers is what kind of business models can exist as these changes occur. Right now, most bloggers work for love not money, which isn't encouraging for the media (and has to be even worse for the bloggers.) On the other hand, open-source proves that community production doesn't have to mean the end of paychecks and profits, so perhaps the industry can survive. But it will definitely need to change.

...I disagree, Andy.

While the Net does, as you say, provide a two way street for communication, there is still a need and demand for expertise, analysis, professional perspective.

Sure, the Net opens the door for countless folks that may have otherwise just been armchair or coffe-house generals, politicians, pundits....but people still want  authoritative perspective - even if they are getting a chance to talk back.

I think the "two-way conversation" is also not quite the right analogy. The Net allows us to converse asynchronously, but one analyst, or authority, or spokesperson can't literally converse with millions of people. There is still a "one to many" aspect to media - even though there are message boards, commenting, communities built around common interests, emails, etc....and I think there will continue to be.

If content is king, great content is divine. 

 

 

Re: "After the shakeout during the Dot com bubble bust, old media is still standing, although they've learned a lesson: Watch where the ad dollars are going (online) and adjust with the times."

The New York Times yesterday published an article about the welcome decline in newspaper circulation. The article explains that, as we continue to migrate to the Web, many of the larger papers have decided it isn't worth the cost to keep up with finding and keeping some readers.

I suppose that in itself is an interesting turn of events. Even if we, as readers, want to keep up with print and online media, we may eventually face rejection from the print industry. Although we're not ready to give up on the print industry, it could be that the print industry is ready to give up on us.

Here's a link to the article. 

The Internet is a bit different from other forms of once-new media in that it's two-way: It blurs the distinction between creator and consumer, lowering barriers to entry and changing broadcasts into conversations. This makes the shift from traditional to online media much bigger than the shift from print to airwaves or from radio to TV.

Two-way conversations are obviously a good thing from a perspective of freedom, democracy and of society overall. But they're also very threatening to people or companies used to the old way of doing things, and I don't think that's just resistance to change. If everyone can be a publisher or broadcaster, there's a lot less need for a media industry at all.