Listening to Radio New Zealand’s Mediawatch podcast this morning, I heard this fascinating excerpt from ABC Radio National’s Saturday Extra program three weeks ago, from former editor of The Age and publisher of online business publications The Business Spectator and the Eureka Report, Alan Kohler, responding to former News Limited editor Campbell Reid:
I actually agree with Campbell in the sense that journalism is extremely vibrant at the moment; there’s a lot going on, but for precisely the opposite reason to Campbell, and that is that I believe that newspapers are dying. But not only does that not matter, I think it’s a great thing. I think newspapers hold journalism back for a couple of reasons.
One is that they’re an incredibly inefficient way of delivering information. They require a whole lot of wood pulp, they need to be delivered using a whole lot of energy to get them there. They get wrapped up in plastic, and so they’re terrible for the planet. And secondly, they’re incredibly limited in scope and size. I mean the size of the newspaper each day — and I’ve been an editor of two of them; I know this — that the size of the newspaper each day is determined by the amount of advertising that’s been sold for that particular paper. So whether the book is for 54 pages or 32 pages is decided not by the stories that are around or the requirement of the public for information that particular day, it’s decided by the advertising. And also because it’s so expensive to produce, it comes out just once a day. And I just don’t think that’s very good. And I think that the reason that the newspaper circulations are declining is because not only people realise that the newspaper is not particularly good for them, or the planet, they get dirty, they get ink all over their hands, but also they’ve now got an alterative, which is the internet. And Wendy’s right, I mean the internet is by far the best way to deliver journalism. It goes all the time, and Business Spectator is going 24 hours a day, there is any number; we can publish any amount of articles that need to be published. It’s entirely flexible. If there’s a lot happening in the world, if there’s a big story going on, it’s just infinitely expandable. And you know, I mean you can see it now with all of the newspapers themselves publishing far more on their websites than they do in the paper
Hear hear.
