Is
content still king? Yes and no. Depends who’s talking and how they’re
defining content. Michael Wolff, magazine
columnist and best-selling-author, stated unequivocally at the recent SIIA
Summit that traditional news organizations – newspapers and broadcast news
alike - are finished. He gave them 18
months at the outside. His solution was
to abandon print and to found Newser, an online news destination. At Newser, machines aggregate news, humans edit
it down to what’s important and then they present it in lively online formats
with links to original sources.
Not
so, countered Vivek Shah, head of the News Business Unit at Time, Inc. Print
journalism lives. Newsgathering as a way
of creating value is disappearing, he said, but voice and personality
matter. It’s all about points of view.
Content
lives and so do newspapers, said Arturo Duran, CEO, Impremedia Digital, a
portfolio of Hispanic periodicals, at an SIIA Summit preview session on digital
publishing. Newspapers have an important role to play. But they need to redefine themselves as
local; they have to own their cities’ local listings and news. Readers trust the name. Newspapers also need
to reinvent their antiquated infrastructure in terms of cost and processes and
be ready to deliver content to any platform.
I cannot see, given the current financial state of the major newspapers, that you could conclude that print newspapers aren't dead.
Posted by: Jane | February 02, 2009 at 11:02 AM