Murdoch Looks Ahead

I'm no fan of Rupert Murdoch, a press (robber) baron whose greed and overtly one-sided journalism have been a malevolent force in the media sphere. But in a speech he gave this week to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, he said a bunch of things that needed saying -- and for that, he's done a real public service.

The speech is online at the News Corp. website, and it's essential reading for anyone in the news business.

Interestingly, News Corp. has been anything but a leader on the Internet. The company made some stabs at it in the 1990s, but retreated in a fairly ignominious way after apparently concluding that there wasn't a good enough business model compared with traditional media.

In his talk to the editors, however, Murdoch showed that he and the people who are briefing him on this stuff are attuned to the emerging world, and in a profound way. Here's a sample:

But our internet site will have to do still more to be competitive. For some, it may have to become the place for conversation. 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 distinction between bloggers and our journalists.

To carry this one step further, some digital natives do even more than blog with text – they are blogging with audio, specifically through the rise of podcasting – and to remain fully competitive, some may want to consider providing a place for that as well.

And with the growing proliferation of broadband, the emphasis online is shifting from text only to text with video. The future is soon upon us in this regard. Google and Yahoo already are testing video search while other established cable brands, including Fox News, are accompanying their text news stories with video clips.

Read the whole thing.

Comments

[Monkeyman]

"There are of course inherent risks in this strategy -- chief among them maintaining our standards for accuracy and reliability."

Oh, Rupert, you're SUCH a card!

[Al]

And who would you hold up for high standards of accuracy? The "paper of record", the NY Times, has an abysmal record - and when they're wrong, like most papers, either there is no reference to the problem or the corrections are buried.

[craig]

Al,
Fox News is so over the top that Moveon.org did a documentary which goes into great detail in explaining what Fox News does. The documentary is called "Outfoxed". I saw it and they had a lot of facts to support their thesis that Fox News is deliberately biased towards the right wing.

[Al]

Craig, come on, MoveOn has about as much credibility as Michael Moore.

I think it should be clear by now that there really is no such thing as objectivity. I heard a clip this morning of Leslie Stahl who was on (I think) Hardball (Chris Matthews' show) and she pointed out that she really shouldn't be on a show like that giving her opinion.

I have to laugh, though. People point out Fox News as being conservative but totally miss that a chunk of the mainstream media is filled with lefties. Competition is good!

[Matthias]

It's sad how you guys twist a speech on media revolution into the tired old leftwing/rightwing nonsense.

Obviously, Murdoch is preparing for a landgrab. He wants a piece of the cake:
"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.

And we in this room – newspaper editors and journalists – are uniquely positioned to deliver that news. We have the experience, the brands, the resources, and the know-how to get it done. We have unique content to differentiate ourselves in a world where news is becoming increasingly commoditized."

And who's going to pay for it all? The advertising industry, of course.

"n the same way we need to be relevant to our readers, the internet provides the opportunity for us to be more relevant to our advertisers. Plainly, the internet allows us to be more granular in our advertising, targeting potential consumers based on where they’ve surfed and what products they’ve bought. The ability to more precisely target customers using technology- powered forms of advertising represents a great opportunity for us to maintain and even grow market share and is clearly the future of advertising."

So big media wants to take over grassroots journalism, and pay for it all with "better" advertising. Hooray.

[Big Gav]

Outfoxed is a great documentary but its sometimes good to look at the bigger picture (Fox "News" is the worst example of what is going on in the media but its not the only one) - check out "Orwell Rolls In His Grave" if you're interested in this sort of thing.

http://biggav.blogspot.com/2005/04/orwell-rolls-in-his-grave.html

[Dan Gillmor]

Big media can't "take over" the grassroots stuff, because the barrier to entry is so low. But big media can adopt it. There's a difference.

[Vidar Hokstad]

As a European I'm constantly amazed at how there are always someone crawling out of the woodwork calling US media "leftist" (or "liberal", which to people from Europe makes it even more confusing, as it seems to be considered the same thing in the US while people considering themselves leftists and liberals in Europe would often both take offence at being lumped together) whenever a debate like this is started.

Personally, I have yet to see a what I'd consider a "leftist" US newspaper or TV station from a European point of view, except for stuff nobody reads like the papers of assorted miniscule socialist groups.

On the contrary, every time I go to the US I'm shocked at the consistently far right agendas being blatantly pushed by almost all mainstream US media. It was particularly noteworthy after September 11th, when even what little criticism you'd find anywhere in mainstream media was framed in a way that made it look as if I was visiting another planet going by the news reporting.

Apparently, in the US "leftist" in the context of media criticism must mean "left of the center of the Republican party"...

I find it particularly noteworthy, because I'm used to having a wide spread from far left to far right in European media - the far left being communist daily newspapers, some of (like l'Humanite in France) have a fairly decent circulation, or a bit more mainstream papers like the Guardian that are still miles left of any major US papers I know off, the far right being represented by major newspapers such as the Daily Telegraph in the UK, and on TV Sky News (in effect a clone of Fox - I don't think Sky is wholly News Corp. owned, but there are tight relationships there) etc., and smaller, more extreme right wing papers.

I've yet to see anything resembling that span of opinions in the US mainstream. I'm aware of smaller fringe papers, but then again that's not what I'm talking about - if so, there are plenty of far more extreme papers both on the left and on the right. I purposefully ignored the Morning Star in the UK, for instance (a communist paper) because it's distribution is tiny and most people wouldn't know about it (contrary to l'Humanite in France, which has widespread nationwide distribution and is widely read).

I really wonder why the US market is so homogenous, considering that the size of the population ought to make it possible for some fairly large niche papers to survive.