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Rushkoff on Newspapers

November 10, 2009 | RSS | EMAIL | PRINT | 3 COMMENTS

Ran across two quotes from Rushkoff today that struck me as quite insightful and worth sharing (in two separate posts for length purposes). The first comes from an article he wrote for Daily Beast about the Rupert Murdoch versus Google thing:

By opening themselves up to immediate vivisection-by-search, news organizations invite the disconnection of their articles from their context and their source. And the more they encourage their content to be parsed in this way, the more they encourage readers to look at the work of their journalists as mere datapoints, isolated from a greater perspective. Like what ringtones are to music.

A very interesting point. The web pretty much kills what was always the main source of differentiation between newspapers: Editorial voice, or, as Rushkoff puts it, a newspaper "tells a story through its selection of articles for a given day, their juxtaposition, and even their flow over time."

The second quote, on open source is now posted as well.

Update (11/10/09): Rex has posted another interesting insight in this Murdoch/Google debate. This one comes from Jason Calcanis and suggests that publishers "could use their robots.txt as a ransom note, selling it to the highest bidder -- Bing or Google." Interesting.

Tags: google, media, newspapers


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COMMENTS

1Matt

I disagree. I think the newspapers main point of differentiation was their balance of speed and accuracy. They were able to fund fulltime staffs that chased relevant, verified news. This news may have been a "datapoint," but it was a very important one to the community

Newspapers ceased to become relevant the day they started relying on citizen journalists to bring them news that their editorial staffs could pontificate on. There is no op-ed page that can match the power of the blogosphere.

The papers might have survived if they fired their pundits and invested in reporters.

November 11, 2009

2Kevin A

Calcanis's idea is an interesting one.

About the Rushkoff quote, I don't think it's so much about editorial voice as it is about the end of scarce distribution. Newspapers made their margin on the fact that a reader had to turn to their pages to find out what was going on in DC, on Wall Street, or overseas because no other source of information was available. Readers had to put up with the editorial selection/presentation because there were few alternatives. Now there are loads. News junkies on RSS can mix and match and decide on their own how they get their information, while aggregators slice and dice it up into little bits for casual browsers. If you want the NYT for politics, the Economist for opinion and the NY Post for sports you can get it in a few clicks in a world where news isn't bricked up behind paywalls.

Another thing that's probably underappreciated is how newspapers have also lost much of their scale advantage - it used to be that the biggest media organizations could defend their margin through cheaper printing, etc. But there is no benefit to operational scale in publishing on the internet. A lone blogger can publish and distribute online for the same cost - or less - that a newspaper can.

November 11, 2009

3Noah Brier

@Matt: Interesting ... I don't completely disagree, though I think it's sort of funny to say that speed was part of their skill. No printed material will ever beat the web when it comes to that.

@Kevin: Good points, though I'd argue that NYT politics section and economist opinion is still edited ...

November 16, 2009