Sunday, April 01, 2007 Cabaero: Real challenges By Nini B. Cabaero Beyond 30
ASIAN media leaders gathered in Manila last week in the Publish Asia 2007 conference to discuss re-inventing newspapers and creating new multimedia products in the era of the Internet and changing consumer behavior.
Reiner Mittlebach, Ifra chief executive officer and conference chair, said the media industry is in transformation. The onset of new media is changing the landscape and the readers are becoming empowered. “They are both consumer and publisher,” he said, referring to blogs and other reader-generated content. They want “24/7” publishing. And the big driver in this change is technology.
If national newspapers are worried about their future in the Internet age, community newspapers, smaller in scale and resources, must be getting nervous.
Philippine community newspapers face the same challenge of battling irrelevance before a young, demanding and dynamic audience; and a reality check in this time of re-invention brings them back to more basic and immediate issues.
The scarcity of talent and the cost-cutting trend in newsrooms demand dexterity, creativity and a focused leadership now more than ever. This is the real challenge to community media.
The reality of the question “Are the days of newspapers numbered?” gives community newspapers the added challenge not only of multiplying their information on several platforms--–website, SMS (short message service), audio, and video--–but also of getting people who could do the basic functions of news gathering and reporting.
This is where leadership becomes crucial because the vision of a multimedia newsroom would require commitment to do more with less.
The issue on the future of newspapers has been the subject of many debates.
The Economist, a weekly newspaper, carried a report titled “Who killed the newspaper?” in its August 26 to September 1, 2006 issue. The Economist said: “The threat to the existence of newspapers does not come from those afflicted by newspapers like the government or through censorship or libel. (It) comes from the technological innovations spawned by the Internet—a rival vehicle for news and information dissemination.”
The simple truth is that the future of print is in putting information in different platforms. Websites. Blogs. Message boards. Electronic newspaper. Information delivered by e-mail, to the mobile phone, to a personal digital assistant or PDA.
Philippine newspapers are multiplying their information in different platforms. It is the “long-tail concept” in media where newspapers with big circulation figures multiply their reach through small revenue products that cumulatively may outnumber the revenue from newspaper sales.
But a reality check brings us back to the newsroom where the lack of a deep bench of skilled journalists becomes a symbol of how the challenge of re-inventing newspapers is complicated by more immediate issues.
Crucial to all these is the leader who would bring the newsroom to a common goal, a shared vision and into the future.
