Murdoch Predicts Gloomy Future for Press
Friday, November 25th, 2005According to the Guardian, Rupert Murdoch is ruffling the establishment media’s feathers again, this time forecasting a gloomy future for newspapers with the growth of the internet, saying he doesn’t know “anybody under the age of 30 who has ever looked at a classified ad.” Here’s how it’s being received by the establishment press:
At a conference last month, the WPP group chief executive, Sir Martin Sorrell, accused Mr. Murdoch of buying web operations “willy nilly”.
What Mr. Sorrell isn’t saying is that newspapers’ revenues from classified ads is drying up, a ‘phenomenon’ that bloggers like Hugh Hewitt, who wrote a book titled Blog : Understanding the Information Reformation That’s Changing Your World, Glenn Reynolds of InstaPundit and others have been talking about for well over a year.
The reality is that informed young people don’t automatically order subscriptions to newspapers like they did a generation ago. There are several reasons for that.
One of the most important reasons for that is because of the scandals that have plagued the formerly mainstream media, especially over this past year. People want information that they see as accurate. That confidence isn’t there after Rathergate, Easongate and the Jayson Blair scandal.
Another important reason for the decline in newspaper readership is because an increasing number of people can access the Internet, read the wire services for the initial reporting, and skip over to a blog for deeper analysis of the news. Whether they’re searching for reports on President Bush’s judicial nominees to Jack Murtha’s calls for immediate “troop redeployment” to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that the words “under God” are unconstitutional to a soldier’s blog from Iraq, reporting on the daily progress being made there.
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