Rupert Murdoch, head of the international media empire called News
Corp., has his eye on young people and their new habits with online
media:
"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.
"Instead, they want their news on demand, when it works for
them. They want control over their media, instead of being controlled
by it. They want to question, to probe, to offer a different
angle."
In a speech yesterday to the American Society of
Newspaper Editors,
Murdoch shared a view of a media future informed by bloggers,
podcasters and Google -- citing, among other things, Phil Meyer's book
The Vanishing
Newspaper
and the recent Carnegie Corporation report on young people's news
habits, both of which I've mentioned here in the past month. The full text of his
speech is online, and recommended reading for journalism
students, professors, bloggers and more.
So is Dan
Gillmor's
blog, which is where I heard about the speech, via an RSS feed. Gillmor
praised Murdoch's openness to
new ideas about the digital future -- even if they don't
change his opinion of Murdoch as "a press (robber) baron whose greed
and overtly one-sided journalism have been a malevolent force in the
media sphere."
(In case you don't follow such things, Murdoch's News Corp. empire
includes not only Fox News, but publications, broadcast and satellite
news operations from his native Australia to The Times of London, the
New York Post, and Fox-everything.)
Footnote:
After reading Murdoch's speech, I dropped a line to Professor Meyer,
an old friend in Chapel Hill, to tell him he was being
quoted by the big-time media mogul a lot of people love to hate.
Murdoch even paraphrased Phil's quip that if you follow the curve of
declining newspaper readership, the last reader will give up the habit "in 2040 -- in April, if you want to be really precise
about it."
Phil wrote back within minutes to say that he'd already heard
about Murdoch's reference to his book -- from a Google news alert. It
beat my e-mail to him "by 3 hours and 17 minutes." (He does tend to be precise about things. In fact, he wrote a book called Precision Journalism in the 1970s -- the first book I ever saw about using computers in journalism.)
Phil's use of Google's alerts is as good an example of changing
news-consumer habits as I need... Anyhow, I hope Murdoch bought a big
box of The Vanishing Newspaper for all his minions -- and didn't just see someone quoting the "2040... April" line from Phil's Media Center webcast last month.
Hmm... maybe one of Phil's grad students will get a thesis out of
tracking the April 2040 date's diffusion across the Web -- perhaps with
added momentum thanks to Murdoch.
5:32:22 PM 
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