The other day Australian marketing website Mumbrella highlighted Rupert Murdoch's pronouncements on the future of print as reported in the Australian press.
What's useful isn't so much what was said (which isn't new), but the fact that Murdoch said it, with the implications for all of us.
In summary Murdoch put a 10-20 year time limit on the future of print. He seemed to say that digital will be the primary form of delivery for newspapers in the next decade and that the presses would probably stop rolling in the decade after that.
Rupert Murdoch also, not surprisingly, said that the future of newspapers is still good, even if they don't appear on dead trees. People still want trusted news sources. That's actually supported by the TNS Digital Lives study I often quote which found that on one hand trust in 'online news' was high, but trust in 'bloggers' (ie by and large non professional journalists) was very low.
The death knell of print is a constant debate in media circles, indeed, another industry titan - Steve Ballmer of Microsoft - similarly put a ten year limit on the future of print a year ago.
But Microsoft doesn't publish newspapers and has a vested interest in talking up the message 'everything will be digital.' A 78 year old media mogul who made his fortune through papers of the old fashioned kind doesn't.
I'd argue that Rupert Murdoch has more or less settled the debate once and for all.
If the most powerful media figure in the English speaking world starts staking his future on digital over print, then that is what will happen - whatever the rest of us think. It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy simply because of the muscle that his global enterprise is able to put behind it.
The ball is now in our (anyone who is involved in brand marketing) court. How prepared are we for the change in terms of skills set?
From half time entertainment to the main event
At times digital marketing seems to have the same status as the magician who comes on during a formal dinner and starts pulling rabbits from hats. A curiosity and a bit of entertainment, but not the main event.
As I've posted before several times, those of us who work in this sector still have a traditional media mind-set, which is one reason why mainstream agencies are often out-flanked by purely digital (and why you often now get people 'doing' digital media without necessarily having any identifiable online footprint themselves).
Sure, we're not going to wake up on Monday and find that our local news agent has replaced the rack of papers and magazines with Amazon Kindles that you rent for the day.
At the same time, ten years is well within the working lifespan of most of us and you could argue that in coming years, while knowledge of print editorial calendars won't be a useless skill, it will be a diminished one.
A few months back US online PR pundit Sarah Evans published a list of things she felt any brand communicator should be armed with in terms of personal know-how.
Some of them I struggled with (for example I don't know basic html tags by heart but have to constantly look them up). But Rupert Murdoch has served us notice. These - and more on top - are the kind of things we'll need to know.
This is our industrial revolution and if we don't watch out, we'll be like the 18th century textile workers who were left behind by the invention of the flying shuttle and the roller spinning machine.
Images - Indio, Kaptain Kobold
Related articles by Zemanta- Paid content: the newspaper industry's suicide pact (billbennettnz.wordpress.com)
- Free web news era over, says Murdoch (Andrew Clark/Guardian) (techmeme.com)
- Some wishful thinking by Rupert Murdoch? (thisisherd.com)
- Murdoch says to get ready to pay up (inquisitr.com)
- Huffington Says The Internet Isn't Killing Newspapers At Senate Hearings (mediabistro.com)
Link to original postLink to original post
Link to original post