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Change or Perish
Are the print media's days finally numbered?
By ERIC ELLIS
September 14, 1999
Web posted at 8 a.m. Hong Kong time, 8 p.m. EDT
Are newspapers and magazines dying? Lots of tech writers, media's newly minted élite, seem to think so. Now they've got as evidence the tablets handed down by one of their Great Gods, Intel chairman Andy Grove. "Nothing sharpens the awareness of the situation like the sight of the gallows," Grove recently told a horrified (and skeptical) gathering of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. The executioner? The Internet of course.
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ASIA BUZZ
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Asia Buzz: The Artist Has Landed!
Mando-pop diva A-Mei touches down at Hong Kong's Kai Tak
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Asia Buzz: Cable News
If this is a rip-off, how come I can't spend any money?
- Monday, Sept. 13, 1999
Asia Buzz: Culture on Demand
Tired of the same old restaurants? Go "nousian"
- Saturday, Sept. 11, 1999
Asia Buzz: What Me Worry?
Another 'scary' deadline passes. Is Y2K a hoax?
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Asia Buzz: It Still Isn't Very There Here
Tuck in your shirt, chew with your mouth closed, make a billion dollars
- Thursday, Sept. 9, 1999
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Hello? The death of newspapers seems to have been presaged since Gutenberg was a boy. Radio and then television were supposed to put print out of business, just as videos were supposed to shut down cinemas. In fact, newspapers feed off TV to purvey infotainment, and the movie industry has never been stronger. Titanic's first billion was made at the box office--it's now minting its second at Blockbuster.
But Grove, himself rather good at making billions, is not a man whose opinions are to be ignored. "Newspapers are caught in the vise of two trends," he said, with their readership lured online and their ad base migrating to auction sites like eBay. "They need to create a product that I, the reader, won't want to put down." He even employs Net jargon in his prescription: they need to become "very sticky."
The Net handles for next to nothing the two most expensive and unwieldy components of the print media business: printing (felling and processing endless quantities of Finnish pine) and distribution (moving truckloads of heavy papers along highways and low roads). Anticipating the trend, U.S. publishing group Knight-Ridder recently moved its head office from Miami to Silicon Valley.
What does this mean for Asia? It means regional newspapers and media must, as the overused Silicon Valley term puts it, "get with the program" or be swept out of the game.
With added competition out there, it is no longer acceptable for newspapers merely to deliver phony news--not false news per se but tailored news that compliant editors rationalize as essential for "nation-building," while nervously eyeing the hotline to the PM or president's office.
Singapore, for one, seems to be getting the message. The flagship Straits Times isn't suddenly a ripping read yet, but it is subtly changing. Recent riots in neighboring Batam were prominently displayed, as have been articles on the East Timor debacle. As editor in chief Cheong Yip Seng told me recently, "We have no choice but to change, to adapt to the new infotech world. If people don't like the Straits Times they can now read the New York Times."
The skeptics' last line of defense: Web publishing ultimately will be undone by the three B's-the bus stop, the bedroom and the bathroom, places where much (most?) newspaper reading takes place. To that the techies respond: "E-ink" and talk of impregnated plastic sheets updated via Net transmissions.
Too weird? So was the fax, once.
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