The future of news
Vin Crosbie: "The newspaper industry has spent billions on the Internet to create online editions that are read by fewer people, less frequently and less fully than print editions. These online editions haven't helped newspapers attract younger readers, and most of them are a financial drain on the newspapers that support them." President and managing partner of Digital Deliverance
Hugo Drayton: "You are correct that the online editions rely heavily on their print counterparts — but this is evolving, with increased, targeted new content, and is not necessarily bad anyway. Re-purposing expensive and high-quality journalism for use in different media for new audiences is a sensible and economic development." Managing Director and Board Member, Telegraph Group Limited
Simon Waldman: "We haven't yet seen a pound for pound value that the Web has given versus print. But we're in the middle of a transition that ends when print dies out. When publishers no longer have to buy, print and distribute paper. We're just before the meltdown." Director of Digital Publishing at Guardian Newspapers Group, Ltd.
Three quotes there from "The Future of News and Newspapers", a fine collection of insight and opinion presented by the Online Journalism Review. Along with Crosbie, Drayton and Waldman, the special report has interviews with Christopher Schroeder of the Washington Post Company; Jim Chisholm of the World Association of Newspapers; Bob Benz of E.W. Scripps Company, and Steven Yelvington of Morris Newspapers Interactive Division.
In his fine introductory article, "What Newspapers and Their Web Sites Must Do to Survive", Vin Crosbie writes that the days of horizontally orientated, single scrollable pages coded for 800x600 displays only are numbered. The present, and the future, is mobile he says: "Whether delivered or retrieved, the most popular means of accessing newspapers online most likely will be on mobile devices — rather than desktop or laptop computers — by the end of this decade. People roam. Today there are more mobile phones (1.2 billion) than wired phones (1.1 billion) or desktop and laptop personal computers (fewer than 600 million) in use worldwide."
Ultimately, says Crosbie, the industry must, "Understand that neither newsprint nor the Web nor digital editions nor wireless is the answer, but that the true convergence of all those into a single unitary product not only is necessary but likely within 10 years." That doesn't give the newspaper business much time, does it?
