Newspapers, It’s The Content Stupid!

A debate on the On Demand Media blog that has a few interesting perspectives on how newspapers will change. Back some ten years ago, news executives began to see that one day the internet would change their business forever. Clearly, printed news and scheduled TV would eventually be disrupted by the web and on-demand viewing, but nobody could quite tell how the new technologies and consumer habits would shape up. Sly Bailey Chief Editor of Daily Mirror UK, speaking at the Digital Britain conference : A consumer is now as likely to discover newspaper content on Google, visit our sites, then flit away before even discovering that it was the Daily Mirror or the Telegraph that created the content in the first place. It is not that people want your content for free. Properly speaking, many of your readers don’t really want it at all. What they want – what satisfies their news habit – is aggregation. It is for that that they used to pay you, back when the only way of aggregating content was to own it and print it all in a newspaper. Read the whole post here