Big Think

Alistair Lamont on January 30, 2009, 4:15 PM

As more and more media organisations lay off journalists and have to find ways of coping with less revenue they will start to build alliances with specialist journalism suppliers (just like politico is doing now by supplying its specialist content to other providers).

In the future you will have newspaper brands that stand for a specific viewpoint / segment as today – except all content (other than editorial) will be outsourced

Therefor the winners will be

1 – the new specialist area ‘story suppliers’ that are not concerned about creating a brand – instead simply do the best deals to supply their content in a variety of different flavours (left, right, centre etc)

2 – the newspapers that realise that they must radically change their business model into edited aggregator (nearly all journalism and AD sales outsourced cutting wage costs drastically) to deal with the reality of lower profitability in the online world.

tim hall on April 22, 2009, 11:03 PM

I read the news online a lot different than newsprint. Online, I read the heading and make a decision if it is worthy of my time. When I read newsprint, I read the headline, opening sentence and maybe the first line of a couple of other paragraphs before I deside if it is worthy of my time. I scan a lot more on the net and I may read 5 different news papers in one session. I really like holding and touching what i’m reading better but I like the speed that I can read 5 different takes on a new story on the net.

I am a graphic designer, I would like to see the news papers go to a biweekly print with Wednesday loaded with adds and Sunday loaded with good journalism, lots of humor, and civic events. I think it should go higher quality and higher price. If people want to scan through the news for free with images creeping around and poping out at them they can access the net. I would like for news print to get rid of those crappy photos and use artist drawn illustrations. Photos were never made for newsprint. Illustrations can enhance a story much better and give a better overall pleasure of reading.

The internet is amazing in to many ways to mention. Socialy it could be a problem. I can go to the internet and read all Republican or all Democract views. I can pick and choose articles on energy that only fit my views. I can read blogs or design my own that only fit my views. With the news paper I can’t just click and get away from different views. The internet will always be the most used news source. I am most interested in seeing where news papers end up. I hope that the internet will lead to more local community interaction. Maybe even lead folks to physically interact in communities once again. We will have more social problems if we let technology physically seclude us too much.

tim hall on April 22, 2009, 11:07 PM