Wake up call to MSM

This speech by Rupert Murdoch hits all the right notes and it is refreshing to see the head of a media conglomerate being so forthcoming. A lot of his content is taken from the Carnegie Reporter report Abandoning the News.

What is happening is, in short, a revolution in the way young people are accessing news. They don’t want to rely on the morning paper for their up-to-date information. They don’t want to rely on a god-like figure from above to tell them what’s important. And to carry the religion analogy a bit further, they certainly don’t want news presented as gospel.

The theme that Main Stream Media (MSM) needs to embrace, involve and better understand the needs and desires of their readership is well articulated in this speech to the of American Society of Newspaper Editors.  MSM needs to  appropriately find ways to integrate user content alongside traditional editorial content - whether it be forums/discussion groups, blogs, vlogs (video), mologs (mobile), podcasts (audio) , wicks, user tagging systems and bookmarking, user ratings, and feedback etc.

The story in today's New York Post Weakened Journal noted that: Earnings plunged by 54 percent at Wall Street Journal's newspaper's parent Dow Jones & Co., with its fledgling online operations earning more money for the first time than the flagship Journal and the weekly Barron's. Print publishing is not a profitable business for Dow Jones anymore and the company hopes long-range growth will come from online publishing, which has profit margins at least 20-fold higher than print.

This should be a final wake up call to any MSM company that is not rapidly reallocating resources from low or negative margin print operations to online.