The Age today offers online a copy of a speech delivered Oct. 14 by Editor-in-Chief Andrew Jaspan. Jaspan delivers some gems including:
Newspapers in terminal decline ? I think not.
That is not to say there are not challenges for media companies like The Age. There are.
There are ferocious pressures on newspapers to reinvent themselves.
For a long time people, in part, tended to buy newspapers for ads and classifieds.
In a sense this masked circulation and sales issues of some newspapers.
This may have also masked journalists’ opinions that readers bought papers purely for the journalism.
Not often you hear a newspaper person in Australia speaking in such a forthright way.
Then there is this indication of their future focus:
We are not in the business of slowly managing decline.
It is about managing the transition to a new environment while rejuvenating and capitalising on The Age’s traditional strengths.
I thought that Arthur Sulzberger Jr, publisher of The New York Times had it right when he recently said “we will follow our readers where they take us. If they want us in print, we will be there in print. If they want us on the Web, we will be there on the Web. If they want us on cellphones or downloaded so they can hear us in audio, we must be there”.
It is good that we have an editor of a major Australian daily putting these issues on the table in a public forum and now through the resources of their newspaper. This invites discussion and that’s what I hope follows between newsagents and others in the traditional supply chain and The Age. Jaspan is right to point his newspaper to where the eyeballs are. We need to, wherever and however possible, make that journey with him.