Tämä on jo vanha uutinen, mutta muistin – omani ja muiden – virkistykseksi keskeiset lainaukset News Corpin Rubert Murdochin sanomalehdistön tulevaisuutta luotaavasta puheesta 13.3. Lontoossa sanomalehtiteollisuuden vaikuttajille (lihavointi minun):
From the wheel to the web, from the printing press to fibre optic cable, it has always been technology that has driven history. Those in the driving seat have always been those who fully understood and used that technology.
Today one of our great challenges is to understand and seize the opportunities presented by the web.
It is a creative, destructive, technology that is still in its Infancy, yet breaking and remaking everything it its path.
The web is changing the way we do business, the way we talk to each other and the way we enjoy ourselves.
As old and new technologies merge, the questions multiply:
Will the internet kill fixed-line telephony? It is already happening via VOIP – Voice Over Internet Protocol.
When high-speed broadband pipes TV and film onto enhanced computer screens at home, what happens to the television companies, the film studios and indeed newspapers?
I pose these questions – and there are many more thrown up by the web – in this context.
There are about one billion people in the world who have access to computers, although only about 10% to broadband.
In 20 or 30 years there will be six billion such people, or two-thirds of the human race. We know the $100 laptop is on the way. In a few years, there could be a $50 laptop.
It would be folly for me to stand here and pretend I know what this really means in any detail for future generations.
But I will answer a question I suspect is forming in your minds.
What happens to print journalism in an age where consumers are increasingly being offered on-demand, interactive, news, entertainment, sport and classifieds via broadband on their computer screens, TV screens, mobile phones and handsets?
The answer is that great journalism will always attract readers. The words, pictures and graphics that are the stuff of journalism have to be brilliantly packaged; they must feed the mind and move the heart.
And, crucially, newspapers must give readers a choice of accessing their journalism in the pages of the paper or on websites such as Times Online or – and this is important – on any platform that appeals to them, mobile phones, hand-held devices, ipods, whatever.
As I have said newspapers may become news-sites.
As long as news organisations create must-read, must-have content, and deliver it in the medium that suits the reader, they will endure.
Great content always has been, and I think always will be, king of the media castle.
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