what’s dying? It’s Not The News; It’s The Paper!
I attended the inaugural Ignite NYC today at M1-5 in the Chinatown area. A crowd of about 350 people turned out and the din was quite formidable at times. But it was a fantastic lineup of speakers and I learned a number of things from the talks.
The last talk in the program was The Future of News by Nick Bilton, who works for the New York Times technology R&D group. Conventional wisdom holds that as more and more advertising moves online, newspapers are a dying business. The carnage happening in the publishing industry seems to bear out this notion. After a brief overview of the history of news, Nick challenged the audience to think beyond this truism. He said that it’s not the news that is dying, it’s just the paper–the medium for its delivery–that is dying.
Newspapers have fallen into a malaise about their financial health and spend reams of one of their most expensive resources, newsprint, writing about exactly this. The problem is: readers really don’t care to read about this and want instead to learn about substantive news that’s going to affect their lives and their communities. Several Internet services–Digg, Google News, NowPublic and outside.in to name a few–have taken a stab at redefining how relevant news is selected and delivered to people. I am hardly one in favor of throwing this important, professionally mandated, socio-political watchdog function entirely to the wisdom of the crowds, but these services are proofs of the concept that news reporting needs to closely examine and adopt some of the value that these services provide.
Some news organizations, such as News Corp are exploring this space aggressively. Others, like the New York Times, are merely coming to terms with the economics of digital media consumption, such as by opening up the paywall that used to surround most of its content. News organizations need to snap out of their malaise, reprogram their corporate DNA, stop attributing their ill-health solely to the shift in advertising and figure out the precise value they are providing to their customers. News isn’t going away anytime soon, and customers will pay for high-quality content that provides them with true value.
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