New Media vs Old

A few short years ago, 'read a good daily newspaper everyday' was a major piece of advice given to people studying degrees in social policy & social science. Such advice seems increasingly outdated. Do any of you regularly buy a paper? I feel I ought to, but even when I do, truth is I've already read most of the stories I am interested in on the paper's web version and have often done so 24 hours before I get my hands on a print version.

So where does this leave the old news media? Some papers have tried to charge for access to their online content, but that hasn't proved successful in the main. The New York Times (NYT), arguably the USA's best broadsheet, invested a lot of its hopes in this approach, but recently relented and made all their copy available free of charge from September of 2007. It turned out that charging just meant many people got their news from elsewhere and not only did NYT miss out on readers they also lost potential web based advertising revenue. For some pundits, NYT's move marked the death knell of the paid content model.

Yet, even with its increased advertising revenues from its new website, NYT is in trouble and some are asking questions about its long term future. Some think it could be that Google might look to buy NYT at some point in the near future. That would have been completely unthinkable ten years ago. Aside from the fact that the NYT is one of the most famous newspapers in the world, Google was little more than a handful of programmers helping people access the relatively new world wide web back then. Now, of course, Google is a giant global company and the main question for those who worked at Google in the early days is 'What should I do now I am a multi-millionaire?'.

If Google does buy NYT it will powerfully illustrate that some fundamental changes in the economy have been unleashed by the web.