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"Google is great for Google, but it's terrible for content providers, because it divides that content quantitatively rather than qualitatively." Thomson continued. "And if you are going to get people to pay for content, you have to encourage them to make qualitative decisions about that content." Thomson was one of three media executives participating in the discussion. Also present were Mort Zuckerman, owner and publisher of the New York Daily News and the editor in chief of U.S. News & World Report, and Walter Isaacson, the president and CEO of the Aspen Institute and the former editor of Time magazine. Without a representative from new media, the tone of the conversation was decidedly negative toward the winds of change.
Zuckerman said the "tremendous economic decline" in advertising comes in tandem with a recession and the Internet's creating a "fundamental change in the technology of the dissemination of news." The Internet "has taken a tremendous bite out of not necessarily the readership of the magazines, but at least of the advertisers who have moved on to the Web, because that seems to be the area where the audience is expanding dramatically." Isaacson was not as negative about technology's impact on media, instead suggesting the next wave of technological innovation could give media a chance to correct the mistake of giving away content. "The main thing I think we've got to do is prevent us from giving it away for free on the Kindles and the new devices, just like we gave it away for free on the Web," Isaacson said. "We've got one more shot at it with these new devices coming. Let's make some really cool newspapers and really cool applications we can put on it that we can actually charge for." CategoriesComments
From: just.a.guy,
But most local newspapers just serve as distribution points for content from the major wire services. If you reduced a local newspaper to the truly local content, I'd wager that nobody would pay for it. There are exceptions in major cities, but most local papers aren't the New York Times or the Washington Post.
Posted on:
February 17, 2009 7:46 PM
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Robert Thomson, managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, in a roundtable 
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Will never understand why newspaper web sites are free. People claim advertising makes up for it, but wouldn't most serious people pay $30 a year for the local paper, no problem? Would help if journalists wrote more intelligent stories, did more investigative journalism. Watching them bungle the bank welfare process gives a good indication how little mainstream reporters understand.