… I ask this question because it seems like the attitude of most European newspaper folk seems quite positive in the face of declining print revenues and print circulation numbers.
Is it merely cock-eyed optimism?
Or is it an acceptance that newspapers, as a medium, are changing, and will necessarily continue to change to survive?
Its hard to really divine the thoughts from a newspaper article, but it certainly seems like its more of the latter than the former. And I think at the end of the day, isn’t that all its about? The will to acknowedge change, and then having the intestinal fortitude, and above all *buy-in* that things will need to change?
I think that’s what got most folks (well, *me* anyway) all riled up after Sam Zell gave his thoughts on his recent acquisition of the Tribune and “those boys” at Google .
Its not that his thoughts were specifically boorish and uninformed, but that he clearly doesn’t have the passion or vision for a man who was in a unique position to effect change. He’s viewing his purchase like any other that he’s made billions off of: a distressed undervalued property that he plans to “turn around”, and, if history is any indication, flip it.
It sounds like European news editors and owners are taking the longer view of things, making appropriate changes to their media strategy, and in so doing, are confident that their efforts will bear real fruit.
Is there a dash of cock-eyed optimism? Perhaps.
But at least its coming from a place which makes sense to me, and isn’t full of bluster and scarcely veiled legal threats.
One Comment
First: there is no such thing as ‘european newspaper folks’. People are different. Even within nations and, yes, even within the different publications in one nation. Regarding Europe, well I don’t know about the other nations but in Germany most of the print newspapers folks are so clueless it hurts. You hardly read anything about blogs in the newspapers. And if you do they get as much facts wrong as possible. More than just one time german journalists managed to get confused with the pi/day numbers and said these numbers are pi/month. Making a simple to catch mistake by the factor of 30, that’s just ridiculous (you can read it in german here: http://www.stefan-niggemeier.de/blog/wiederholungstaeter-iii/ ). Now you know what these guys know about t’internet. Online presences of german newspapers are pretty bad too. Most of them don’t seem to take the internet too serious.
You see, at least in germany most of them are pretty clueless.
I follow the discussions in the englishspeakin blogosphere for quite some time now and I read about the US-Newspapers now and then and I can tell you what us-newspapers are doing right now is at least 2+ years ahead of there germany is. The next years are really going to hurt em.