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Thursday, April 14, 2005


RUPERT MURDOCH ON THE STATE OF NEWSPAPERS:
Read his full speech here. A kosmic kwote, you ask? Sure, why not:
The digital native doesn’t send a letter to the editor anymore. She goes online, and starts a blog. We need to be the destination for those bloggers. We need to encourage readers to think of the web as the place to go to engage our reporters and editors in more extended discussions about the way a particular story was reported or researched or presented.

At the same time, we may want to experiment with the concept of using bloggers to supplement our daily coverage of news on the net. There are of course inherent risks in this strategy -- chief among them maintaining our standards for accuracy and reliability. Plainly, we can’t vouch for the quality of people who aren’t regularly employed by us – and bloggers could only add to the work done by our reporters, not replace them. But they may still serve a valuable purpose; broadening our coverage of the news; giving us new and fresh perspectives to issues; deepening our relationship to the communities we serve, so long as our readers understand the clear distinction between bloggers and our journalists.
The newspaper industry faces a particularly interesting task. As news organizations, each has a standard of quality, accuracy, and fairness to protect. But the pluralistic age is upon us, and newspapers have been swallowed by the caucophony of voices that society now values. The dominant mode of technology in news delivery - paper and printing presses - are too sequential and slow for today's 'total experience' world, immersed in mass electricty and the world wide web. But to simply give more voices a fair hearing under the guise of the newspaper risks credibility.

My own imagination sees a reduction of hard news outlets and opinion departments of newspapers. I see organizations such as the AP with increased importance - to deliver more or less empirical facts of a given story - names, places, statements, plotlines. And in the place of op-ed pages and high-priced newspaper columnists, I see bloggers and the like. Essentially, I predict a more centralized fact-source, and a radically decentralized commentariat. Bloggers, as a general rule, cannot operate without larger institutions that provide material for blogger comment. The blog rests on the shoulders of factual news. The CNNs, the APs, and the like need to continue, else we won't have mass-distribution of the facts. But the George Wills, the Maureen Dowds, the David Brooks, the Kathleen Parkers - why keep them on staff when bloggers do the same work they do, for free?

And what of our dailies? Our New York Times, our Chicago Sun-Times, our Dallas Morning News? I imagine a continued shrinkage of readership of paper news. I don't see an elimination entirely, but instead a reduction in the normal number of pages in a given newspaper. I see it as more of a flyer, that advertises what's on the paper's website. Sure, there will be cursory newsfeeds in print, and plenty of want-ads and such. But the action is on the web. News sites will expand their interactivity, their video feeds, their flash and animated journalism, their discussion forums, their blogs.

The prime source for news will be the web, because it can change on a dime - like our thoughts, and like the world itself. Anything in print is already old news. Print is very important, to be sure, but now and in the future it will be more an artifact produced by cyber consciousness. Print news is the outer skin for a body whose transformative powers move at far too fast and complex a rate for Gutenberg's industrial age toys. The internet, per se, is the first step. The coming years will see the real emergence of 'broadband news', to mirror our broadband awareness, day in and day out - to mirror a full-spectrum, integral worldview.
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