Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Newspapers have long journey to go

Definitely, the speech by Rupert Murdoch to the American society of Newspaper Editors has reminded me a vibrant discussion that emerged in our class just in the previous year when our lecturer for ‘New Media Technologies’ Mr. Charles Irigo posed a question as to whether the new means of communications (internet) should replace the traditional media.
Murdoch’s speech explains eloquently about the role of newspapers in the digital world taking into consideration the technology which has grown significantly. Murdoch says newspaper’s readership is deteriorating greatly and thus necessitating an assessment of the reason behind such a situation.
“We’ve sat by and watched while our newspapers have gradually lost circulation. We all know of great and expensive exceptions to this- but the technology is now moving much faster than in the past. Where four out of five Americans in 1964 read a paper everyday, today, only half do,” reads speech in part.
He says the technology has grown more and thus providing more sophisticated channels through which people can obtain and disseminate information in interactive way. The new means of communication have an advantage of capturing people’s attention given their features of interactivity and hence doing away with the tradition dominance of some few people who decides what people should or shouldn’t get as he says in the speech.
“They don’t want to rely on a god-like figure from above to tell them what’s important. And to carry the religious analogy a bit further, they certainly don’t want news presented as gospel.”
To accommodate the situation Murdoch suggests major improvements in the newspapers’ industry particularly finding out ways to cope with the fast growing technology including using newspapers websites to win hearts and minds of people.

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