Here's a quote from the article by Rupert about the new media world..."To find something comparable, you have to go back 500 years to the printing press, the birth of mass media – which, incidentally, is what really destroyed the old world of kings and aristocracies. Technology is shifting power away from the editors, the publishers, the establishment, the media elite. Now it’s the people who are taking control."...for a man that comes from the establishment he certainly is making sure that News Corp are making some pretty smart moves to ensure that they are not totally destroyed by the new wave.
I especially like this quote from Peter Chernin, News Corp.’s president and Murdoch’s second in command to Ross Levinsohn, who recommened the buying of both MySpace / Intermix Media (for $580 million US) and IGN.com (for $650 million US)..."It’s a couple of percent of our market cap," he told Levinsohn. "Either we’re serious about this or we’re not."
Hmmm...with an attitude like that which is backed up by having the money to throw around as well, I think News Corp may be one of the old world media companies to keep a really close eye on.
The article gives you a good view into how he (and News Corp) are thinking about this space and it certainly makes you take a good look at all those "new media" people that constanly go around ranting about the "death of old media companies"...i don't believe that old media companies will die...they will just change and adapt as they (the smart ones) always have.
The notion that a new media kills old media is total hogwash...cinema and radio didn't kill print...tv didn't kill cinema...VHS, DVD's,cable and satellite didn't kill the cinema or TV...the internet didn't kill tv or radio...mobile phones and PDA's haven't killed the desktop PC...the list goes on...new media types (and what we are really talking about here in general are delivery mediums) only take a slice of the available time that people can devote to media consumption...over time they do change the balance...but it takes major changes like vinyl records vs CD's (analogue vs digital) to kill-off an old media delivery platform.
In my view the only thing that will really kill of all of the old media delivery methods is when we finally get a plug into the back of the brain...which I have no doubt will happen in my lifetime....until then, as new media producers, advertisers and marketers we really need to try and get along with the old media (even if we don't believe in their model) for a variety of reasons and help them to understand that they need to adapt or they risk loosing more of their market share and not run around screaming that we are going to kick them as they slowly but surely become less and less relevant.
Without choice and competition from the old media world the new media world will fail to go beyond the long tail audience, which is fine for the individual bloggers, podcasters and vloggers, but the content will still only reach a small percentage of the worlds media consumers (and i use consumers in the nice sense of the word not in the marketing speak way that conjures up images of cows eating grass or battery hens eating pellets of whatever it is they feed battery hens). In the words of dotcom 1.0 era...content IS king and it will always be king...good and varied content brings viewers/listeners/readers and large numbers of viewers/listeners/readers bring advertisers and we all know what they bring...dollars. Guess what dollars means??? More content...better content...better technology being developed to access that content...all of the things that we all want.
Anyway...those are my thoughts on the matter...
Note: I'm adding bits to this entry as i'm coming up with varied thoughts on the whole thing and struggling with how to say them correctly...sorry...
Posted by Mick (SplaTT) Stanic at June 29, 2006 6:35 PM
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