Ex-Australian alleged newspaper industry visionary Rupert Murdoch now believes that only a
Kindle-like digital reader can save the newspaper business :
“If it doesn’t, newspapers will go out of business. All newspapers. There’s just not enough advertising to go around.”All newspapers, Rupert? Or just most of yours?
The day that Australians are expected to start paying to gain access to Digital Rupert News Media seems to keep slipping deeper and deeper into 2010.
Meanwhile, NineMSN, Yahoo7, the ABC and SBS will not be charging readers to access their online news, and now Fairfax has announced it will Wait N See how disastrous the paywalls turn out to be for Digital Rupert before they make a decision.
The other huge problem that Digital Rupert doesn't mention, at least in the US, is that even while established newspapers are still online for free, eyeballs are already going elsewhere online. America's most famous newspapers, including Murdoch's New York Post, are hemorrhaging readers.
More than two out of three among the top 30 newspaper Web sites reported year-over-year declines in unique users in October according to new data from Nielsen Online.It's not just a case of, as Murdoch claims, "there's not enough advertising to go around." There's also not enough readers, for the massive abundance of digital news, to go around. There's simply too much else to do online, or on an iPhone, than to read through the same headlines you've already seen on half a dozen other news sites, or on Twitter.
Physical newspapers are no longer essential for most people in their day to day lives. And online newspapers are becoming, likewise, less than essential for those who can access a world of free information and news already.
These are revolutionary, and revelatory, times for the established corporate news media that can now no longer control, or even majorly influence, the flow of news and information. At least, not like they could and did, only a few short years ago.
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