[wordup] <nettime> Murdoch Sees: The Internet

[Adam Shand]

Via: Brett Shand <brett at earthlight...>

Pretty interesting but for the wrong reasons, and somewhat sad, I 
thought.

From: "Geoff Manaugh" <gmanaugh at movingsurface...>
To: <nettime-l at nettime...>
Sent: Thu, 14 Apr 2005 13:07:05 -0400

Like watching a potato try to come up with something. A dream, a
vision... an acknowledgement of the internet? In 2005? Go, little
potato! Little billionaire potato! You're brilliant!

-------------------------------------------
We ignore internet at our peril, Murdoch warns editors

Chris Tryhorn, City correspondent / Guardian (UK) / Thursday April
14, 2005

Rupert Murdoch has admitted he "didn't do as much as [he] should
have" to confront the digital challenges faced by his newspaper
business, which owns the Sun, Times and News of the World in the UK
as well as titles in the US and Australia.

Describing himself as a "digital immigrant" in contrast to his
young daughters, who would be "digital natives", he said the
internet was "an emerging medium that is not my native language".

In a speech to American editors in Washington, Mr Murdoch issued a
stark warning to the industry, arguing that the web was "a fast-
developing reality we should grasp".

He said consumers wanted "control over the media, instead of being
controlled by it", pointing to the proliferation of website diaries
known as "blogs" and message boards.

And newspaper editors simply cannot afford to ignore this, he said,
or to look down on readers or ignore what they actually wanted.

"I believe too many of us editors and reporters are out of touch
with our readers. Too often, the question we ask is 'Do we have the
story?' rather than 'Does anyone want the story?'"

"As an industry, most of us have been remarkably, unaccountably
complacent," Mr Murdoch said.

"Certainly, I didn't do as much as I should have after all the
excitement of the late 1990s. I suspect many of you in this room
did the same, quietly hoping that this thing called the digital
revolution would just limp away.

"Well it hasn't... it won't... and it's a fast-developing reality
we should grasp as a huge opportunity to improve our journalism and
expand our reach."

Mr Murdoch was one of the early pioneers in the internet in the mid-
1990s but rowed back in the late 1990s when the dotcom industry
overheated with billions of pounds squandered on ambitious but
ultimately doomed dreams.

Now, however, the Sun is, along with the Guardian and the BBC, one
of the top 10 news websites in the UK but the online operations of
the Times and Telegraph, which have not received the same
investment, are not ranked in the top tier.

Mr Murdoch, who recently held a summit with his newspaper bosses
about forging a new internet strategy, said the industry had "sat
by and watched" as circulations had fallen over the past 40 years,
complacent because of its historic monopoly on the news business.

A rise in population had masked a relative decline in the TV age,
he said, while in the 1990s profitability had held up in spite of
circulations falling, further lulling the industry into a false
sense of security.

"But those days are gone," he warned. "The trends are against
us...so unless we awaken to these changes, which are quite
different to those of five or six years ago, we will, as an
industry, be relegated to the status of also-rans."

Mr Murdoch's comments came as his News Corp empire, which has
interests in TV, film and newspapers, mulls how to best to approach
the internet and new media.

Since the dotcom bubble burst, News Corp has concentrated its
online efforts around its newspapers in the UK and Australia and
its film and television holdings in the US.

Mr Murdoch, who turned 74 last month, admitted it was hard for
"digital immigrants" like him to get to grips with the challenge of
the internet.

"The peculiar challenge then, is for us digital immigrants - many
of whom are in positions to determine how news is assembled and
disseminated - to apply a digital mindset to a set of challenges
that we unfortunately have limited to no first-hand experience
dealing with.

"We need to realise that the next generation of people accessing
news and information, whether from newspapers or any other source,
have a different set of expectations about the kind of news they
will get, including when and how they will get it, where they will
get it from, and who they will get it from."

He said consumers between the ages of 18-34 were increasingly using
the web as their medium of choice for news and neglected more
traditional media.

Young people's attitudes towards newspapers were "especially
alarming", he said. "Only 9% describe us as trustworthy, a scant 8%
find us useful, and only 4% of respondents think we're
entertaining."

He described the shift in attitudes as "a revolution in the way
young people are accessing news".

"They don't want to rely on the morning paper for their up-to-date
information. They don't want to rely on a God-like figure from
above to tell them what's important. And to carry the religion
analogy a bit further, they certainly don't want news presented as
gospel."

But in spite of the gloomy picture he painted, Mr Murdoch said he
was still confident about the future of the news business. "The
data may show that young people aren't reading newspapers as much
as their predecessors, but it doesn't show they don't want news. In
fact, they want a lot of news, just faster news of a different kind
and delivered in a different way."

He said he wanted to turns newspapers into "destinations" that
rivalled the success of the internet portals, "the Yahoos, Googles,
and MSNs".

"The challenge for us... is to create an internet presence that is
compelling enough for users to make us their home page. Just as
people traditionally started their day with coffee and the
newspaper, in the future, our hope should be that for those who
start their day online, it will be with coffee and our website."

The migration of readers online was also affecting advertising
revenues, Mr Murdoch said. "The threat of losing print advertising
dollars to online media is very real. In fact, it's already
happening, particularly in classifieds."

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