The story of the week about the future of newspapers is that of an interview with Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO of Google published by the Financial Times. It is referenced in more than 500 news entries listed at Google. Schmidt explains that Google looked at investing in newspapers and decided against this. While at FT.com you need to pay to read the interview, The Guardian provides free access to its report containing key quotes from Schmidt like:
“The reality is that news gathering and the profitability model was always an uncomfortable relationship because it’s very difficult to make money from a story about a tragedy or murder or so forth – and yet it’s enormously valuable. So the structure of newspapers that evolved, where the majority of the revenue came from classifieds and these big, untargeted print ads, the content was fascinating but they were not connected to… it was ultimately destined to be challenged by technology and that’s indeed what happened.”
It says something about the concern of the future of newspapers that this is such a story.
From a newsagent perspective, this story and its broad coverage overseas and even here in Australia provides further encouragement for us to look outside traditional categories for future growth and sales.
From the 1800s until the 1980s newsagents stood for being the go to retail and distribution businesses for newspapers and magazines. Since the 1980s this point of difference has eroded. What do we stand for today? As a channel – nothing. Individually – some of us have clear and exciting points of difference.
The Google story, like many I reference here, is a reminder that the clock is ticking – the time for us to engage proactively in our businesses is now.
So what, newspapers and writers will copyright their content and google can,t touch it. The sooner this happens then everyone knows where they stand. What google are up to is thieving and it should be stopped.