Alan Mutter is, among other things, a blogger passionate about journalism and technology. I referred in a post yesterday to his post about the challenges to the newspaper model. Alan was in New Zealand in March and posted about the problems of poor and expensive broadband coverage. He also labels NZ newspaper websites as being from the 1990s.
If Alan Mutter were to visit Australia he would be even more critical of our broadband coverage. It is slow, expensive and patchy in its geographic spread. How we are expected to be competitive with such poor infrastructure is a question which must be asked of politicians. While it suits me as a retail newsagent because I will benefit from a slower migration online, I get the reality that news and information will shift online – it provides me with an opportunity to reinvent business.
Our politicians MUST fix the broadband mess and quickly. The cost to the economy of our businesses getting left behind because of poor broadband policy will be extraordinary.
What Mutter would like, I suspect, is our newspaper websites. The Fairfax offering is among the best in the world. News Ltd is catching up. Outside of these giants, we also have great sites such as Perth Norg showing what independents can do. Our sites are certainly better than those in New Zealand. We also have a robust online classifieds community including the Find It offering I am behind.
The news and information sites in Australia ought to be a motivator to newsagents to act on their own futures. For that to happen we need to collectively lift our heads out of the sand and see what is happening – slow broadband or not.
Alan also blogs eloquently and humorously about “dags“.