Reactions to the Newspaper Extinction Timeline: brickbats and (a few) bouquets

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It would be fair to say that my Newspaper Extinction Timeline, released on Monday, has stirred up some controversy.

A partial list of media coverage I have seen so far is at the bottom – I am doing a stack of interviews today and tomorrow so I know there is more to come.

Reactions to the timeline has varied from taking the forecasts at face value, to more commonly scepticism at the pace of change I suggest, to a handful describing it as “complete rubbish”.

It’s worth providing a little background to why I have created the timeline. Given that the future is uncertain, I long believed that it was not appropriate to make specific prognostications. I thought (and still do) that scenario planning was the best way to help people understand the scope of uncertainty in the future, and to prepare effectively.

However in more recent years I have found that being more specific helps to focus people’s minds. If they think the forecast may be right, then there is something very concrete that they have to think through and work out how best to respond. If they disagree, then they need to think through why they think the forecast is wrong, helping to crystallize their own thinking.

The esteemed Roy Greenslade of the Guardian has written about the newspaper timeline two days in a row now, first discussing the forecasts and anticipating “inevitable brickbats” for me, then covering some of the responses to my timeline.

I am delighted that Roy picked up on what is exactly the kind of response to my timeline that I was looking for, from Earl Wilkinson of International Newspaper Marketing Association, who wrote a thoughtful piece about the timeline, excerpted here:

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The role of BRIC in the future of global media

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As I mentioned the other day, I am giving the keynote at Ketchum PR’s Global Media Network meeting in New York later this week. One of the themes of my keynote will be the increasing divergence in the structure of media markets around the world, which I will illustrate with my Newspaper Extinction Timeline.

Immediately after my keynote will be a panel on Breaking Through BRIC: Understanding These Influential Global Media Landscapes, which will look at what is happening in the media landscapes of Brazil, Russia, India, and China. Media industry experts from Ketchum’s offices in Brazil, Russia, and India will be on the panel, with Nicholas Scibetta, the Global Director of Ketchum’s Global Media Network as moderator. Since Ketchum’s China team is tied up with client work at home, I have been asked to step in to speak about the Chinese media market, since I have had a fair amount of exposure to this over the years.

I will take notes from the panel as I can and share them – this has to be one of the most fascinating topics of today.

Launch of Newspaper Extinction Timeline for every country in the world

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[UPDATE December 20, 2017: Read a review of the Newspaper Extinction Timeline 7 years after it was published]
Back in August [2010] I predicted that newspapers in their current form will be irrelevant in Australia in 2022. That received significant international attention including from The Australian, The Guardian, Editor & Publisher (which called me the ‘Wizard of Aussie’) and many others.

Part of the point I wanted to make was that this date is different for every country. As such I have created a Newspaper Extinction Timeline that maps out the wide diversity in how quickly we can expect newspapers to remain significant around the world. First out is USA in 2017, followed by UK and Iceland in 2019 and Canada and Norway in 2020. In many countries newspapers will survive the year 2040.

The Australian has again covered this in a story title Deadline for newspapers as digital publications rise. There may be some more coverage in coming days.

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Click on image to download full framework

The second page of the framework explains both the global and national drivers leading to the wide disparity in how quickly newspapers will move on, and provides some notes to the framework.

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Keynote on the Future of Global Media in New York

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After Future of Crowdsourcing Summit in San Francisco next week I will be heading on to New York, where among other things I will be at the Ketchum Global Media Network meeting where I will do the keynote and participate in a panel on the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) media landscapes.

Here is the description of my keynote:

The Future of Global Media

Until now media markets have been fairly similar across nations. Today we are seeing a massive divergence in media structures around the world. While some fundamental drivers of change such as social networks and the extraordinary rise of mobile media are prominent everywhere, these and other forces are playing out very differently across East and West, old and new economies. Across all markets, the structures for how news and content are created and become visible are rapidly evolving. The implications for corporate marketers include new perspectives on global campaigns, and the potential to tap into a vast lattice of existing and new channels to reach customers.

And here are full details on the event (also see the event website)

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Why this year Crowdsourcing is the topic of our Future Summit Series in San Francisco and Sydney

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I’ve been remiss in not yet mentioning Future of Crowdsourcing Summit on my blog, so here is a bit of background to the event. Full details are on the Summit website with an overview in the flyer below.

Future of Crowdsourcing Summit 2010

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ABC24: Can newspapers successfully charge for online content?

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My thoughts on newspaper content paywalls were recently featured in an interview on ABC24.

The segment begins with an overview of newspapers’ plans to charge for online content, including quotes from Rupert Murdoch and industry commentators, and is followed by an interview with me.

My comments in the interview include:

* There are better chances of charging for online news working for Australia, given the unusual concentration of media ownership.

* Of the various models of charging for online content, Australian newspapers are most likely to provide some content for free and a subscription for full access.

* While we cannot know whether the ‘grand experiment’ of charging for online news in 2010 will work given changing consumer attitudes, the chances are slim it will succeed.

* Some newspaper proprietors seem to hope that bundling online and iPad news with newspaper subscriptions will increase print subscriptions, though that is likely to be negligible.

The Daily Me is finally arriving with the convergence of social news and tablets

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Last week I wrote about Flipboard and Paper.li: Social news curation hits the tipping point. The news today is that Betaworks, which developed or supported the highly successful Tweetdeck, bit.ly, Tumblr and far more, is working on News.Me, a ‘personalized news service’, in collaboration with New York Times.

While neither organization would say much about it, this will clearly be a social news service that will tap, among other resources, the vast data bit.ly has (presumably) collected on what links are shared on Twitter and other social networks. New York Times invested in Betaworks in its March $20 million Series B, and then shifted one of its early stage products into Betaworks, where it is soon to emerge as News.Me.

In his 1995 book Being Digital Nicholas Negroponte wrote about the idea of a ‘Daily Me’ newspaper, that would provide news tailored to the individual. This spawned a multi-year debate about the supposed evils of the Daily Me, which would mean people wouldn’t be exposed to the diversity of the world and would live within their own navels.

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Flipboard and Paper.li: Social news curation hits the tipping point

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Flipboard and Paper.li are two of the hottest properties in media today. Over the last six weeks they have taken social news curation to a new level. This will undoubtedly soon spawn hordes of competitors, while these leaders in the field continue to evolve their offerings. The result will be that we all have far better access to the news that we want from world of infinite information.

Flipboard was launched on July 21, at the time announcing that they had received $10.5 million in funding. For several weeks it was ranked one of the top few free iPad apps in the News category in US, UK, and Australia, attracting massive interest for what it calls a “social magazine”.

Paper.li has been around a bit longer, but has just taken off properly in the last few weeks, as the chart below illustrates.

paperli_alexa.jpg

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Visualization of top iPad News apps in Australia

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As part of our ongoing research into iPad and media, and also to provide some insights for the audience of the iPad Strategy Workshop we ran at Newspaper Publishers Association, we created a visualization of the top 30 paid and free iPad apps in Australia, as of 24 August 2010.

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Click on the image for full-size pdf

The chart shows in the left hand column free apps, and on the right hand side paid apps, each ranked from #1 to #30 in order of popularity on iTunes. The following bar shows the price (for paid), the user rating on iTunes, and the size of the download in MB. The horizontal axis for paid apps indicates price.

The color code shows the type of app, bringing to attention a number of interesting features, for example that aggregators are very popular in paid apps, and that broadcast and newspapers dominate in free apps.

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Presentation from iPad Strategy Workshop at Newspaper Publishers Association

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The iPad Strategy Workshop at Newspaper Publishers Association Future Forum was a big success. In a large room laid out for 120 there was just standing room by the time it started, with great content and a highly engaged audience.

The Twitter stream for #iPadStrat gives a pretty fair overview of proceedings, though there were just a small minority of people on Twitter in a room full of newspaper publishers.

Here are the slides from opening presentation, as promised:

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