First Draft by Tim Porter

More than a Newspaper

MediaSavvy checks in with more from the NAA's conferences on readership and the future of newspapers: New media consultant Peter Zollman reports that the overarching message was that a "newspaper has to be more than a newspaper to survive."

This is not news to those of us who watch newspapers cling to the past as the future races ahead without them, but Zollman says the conferences were refreshingly "thought-provoking and blunt" despite the presence of a "fair amount of boosterism and hucksterism by people who either don't see the threat to newspapers' survival, or don't want to admit it."

MediaSavvy's author, Barry Parr, points out newspapers cannot save themselves by simply embracing new technologies: "The next ten years will be a time of crisis for the newspaper industry, and delivering news to PDA's--or Web browsers for that matter-- isn't going to save them if they don't fix the core product. … If newspapers are going to survive, they're going to have to be better newspapers."

Exactly. See my earlier post on the NAA conference: Service, Context, Dialogue.

Posted by Tim Porter at January 23, 2003 11:09 AM