Finally, someone gets it

Posted on November 19, 2009 by Ian Betteridge

Murdoch to Google: Search This:

“No, what Murdoch has realized is that a newspaper is not just valuable for the individual stories or tidbits that can be culled, piecemeal, from a generic list. A newspaper provides context. It tells a story through its selection of articles for a given day, their juxtaposition, and even their flow over time.

By opening themselves up to immediate vivisection-by-search, news organizations invite the disconnection of their articles from their context and their source. And the more they encourage their content to be parsed in this way, the more they encourage readers to look at the work of their journalists as mere datapoints, isolated from a greater perspective. Like what ringtones are to music.”

Finally, someone gets it.

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
This entry was posted in Publishing. Bookmark the permalink.
  • http://www.macuser.co.uk Kenny

    Rushkoff is right: there is a place for in-depth, properly edited, contextual paid-for content on the web. The problem for publishers is that they’ve spent years dragging their online news downmarket in search of traffic (the Telegraph’s @budget balls-up being a good example) so they can feed the stats to advertisers. Re-inventing online brands so that they are perceived as being worth paying for will be very, very tricky.

  • Duncan Corps

    (OT, @PeterNBiddle) Chalk and cheese: iTunes didn’t create the singles business, singles mostly stand alone without their album’s context. The singles business already existed and record labels tried to displace it with the albums business (for great profit?).

  • Ian Betteridge

    Kenny – totally. Tricky, but if they’re going to do it now is the best time.

  • http://www.cookdesign.co.uk Gary Cook

    Never particularly been a Murdoch-hater myself. The guy has a lot of balls and is one of the few people in publishing who has the courage to put a ton of money where his mouth is, which is why he’s as successful as he is. Whatever your opinion of his newspapers, magazines and websites, he’s trying to do something different, totally against the flow. His ideas may well define the next decade in publishing. Actually, maybe he should take over from Steve Jobs.