{"id":453,"date":"2005-04-15T10:39:55","date_gmt":"2005-04-15T15:39:55","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=453"},"modified":"2005-04-15T11:31:12","modified_gmt":"2005-04-15T16:31:12","slug":"not-his-native-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/not-his-native-language\/","title":{"rendered":"Not His Native Language, but He Read Phil Meyer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Rupert_Murdoch\">Rupert Murdoch <\/a>told US editors yesterday that the &#8220;Internet is an emerging medium that is not my native language.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>As the big Fox told the editors that News Corp had slept too long during the Internet emergence, he quoted <a href=\"http:\/\/www.unc.edu\/~pmeyer\/\">Phil Meyer<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nOne writer, Philip Meyer, has even suggested in his book <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ajr.org\/Article.asp?id=3831\">The Vanishing Newspaper<\/a> that looking at today&#8217;s declining newspaper readership &#8212; and continuing that line, the last reader recycles the last printed paper in 2040 &#8212; April, 2040, to be exact.<\/p>\n<p>There are a number of reasons for our inertia in the face of this advance. First, newspapers as a medium for centuries enjoyed a virtual information monopoly &#8212; roughly from the birth of the printing press to the rise of radio. We never had a reason to second-guess what we were doing. Second, even after the advent of television, a slow but steady decline in readership was masked by population growth that kept circulations reasonably intact. Third, even after absolute circulations started to decline in the 1990s, profitability did not.<\/p>\n<p>But those days are gone. The trends are against us. Fast search engines and targeted advertising as well as editorial, all increase the electronic attractions by a factor of 3 or 4. And at least four billion dollars a year is going into R&#038;D to further improve this process.<\/p>\n<p>So unless we awaken to these changes, which are quite different to those of 5 or 6 years ago, we will, as an industry, be relegated to the status of also-rans. But, properly done, they are an opportunity to actually improve our journalism and expand our reach.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/newscorp.com\/news\/news_247.html\">Full speech at The News Corp site.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Rupert Murdoch told US editors yesterday that the &#8220;Internet is an emerging medium that is not my native language.&#8221; As the big Fox told the editors that News Corp had slept too long during the Internet emergence, he quoted Phil Meyer: One writer, Philip Meyer, has even suggested in his book The Vanishing Newspaper that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,1,9,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alumni-and-other-friends","category-general","category-information-commons","category-news-of-news","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}