Tuesday 17 February 2009

Media companies realising new media is well and truly here.

Just thought I'd share this quote from an article in the Australian Financial Review, "Opportunities in a mix of old and new" (17/2/09, p31). It's from Caroline Little, CEO of Guardian News and Media North America.

"Multimedia platforms are no longer the future, they are here and the focus is not necessarily to preserve newspapers, but to preserve core journalism values while stretching out into the new media."

The article discusses how businesses see the incredible potential of the new media landscape but are "struggling to turn unprecedented reach and audience into revenue streams". AFR is certainly one of the more backwards examples, with all of their content locked behind a subscriber wall with an astronomical price tag attached (as most of you would have discovered if you clicked on my link above). Are THEY feeling challenged?

I've spent the last few days writing an article on these very issues within the general publishing world, drawing on Sherman Young's analysis of the core values of the book. It also gave me the opportunity to really mull over and draw from Sarah Lloyd's article "A book publisher's manifesto for the 21st century". I think this will be a defining work for publishers looking to the next generation of publishing. My article may not be quite so seminal, but I'm reasonably happy with it and it will probably appear in a Wolters Kluwer publication later this year.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

You must be very dumb if you don't notice the hypocrisy of a person at Wolters Kluwer writing this.

Linda Moore said...

Hi Betty, I don't disagree that publishers of professional information are struggling with the same issues. However the contrast is currently much more noticeable in the media industry, where freely accessible news has been a reality for some time. One of the reason I write about this is to highlight that publishers, including Wolters Kluwer, need to be considering how to make their information discoverable and accessible while still maintaining the integrity of the information (ie paying the authors and editors to produce and edit the information in the first place).