Interesting Chart: Newspaper Ad Revenue Crashes

The Problem

Over the past decade the impact of the internet (blogs, Twitter, and Facebook) has replaced the newspaper as the primary source of daily information. With iPhones, iPads, and the ability to send photos or video around the world instantly over the social networks, print is just too slow. Example: video streamed live during the last tsunami, not from the news services, but from individual cell phones.

The Necessary Change

The print media, like the book industry, must adapt to the changes occurring around them. Publishers realized when ebook sales surpassed print book sales, several quarters ago, that they must embrace what they have resisted for so long. The print newspaper industry must also adapt or perish. Without the meager addition of online sales the newspapers would be back to the 1950’s revenue.

Impact on You

We are all susceptible to change, which remains constant. Humans are the most adaptable creatures on the planet and businesses must also be adaptable. Look around and see what technology or resource you are resisting to adopt. It may be just what you need to prepare for the future.

Journalism Described by a Journalist

From The Paris Review - Spring 2011

Janet Malcolm has written many books of non-fiction and magazine articles since her publishing debut in The New Yorker in 1963. Yet for all the volume of her output (and its quality), her largest claim to fame still probably rests on one 26-word sentence she wrote more than 20 years ago. The sentence reads: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” That declaration, found on the first page of her book The Journalist and the Murderer, was a lightning rod for debate back then and truism though it may be, it’s lost none of its power to provoke since.