Many newspaper titles have disappeared altogether, or have been merged, in response to the growth of radio and television. The emergence of the Internet simply reduces the market for newspapers even further. Newspapers will not disappear altogether, the merging will just keep going on. Newspapers will also have to re-think their content, padding up with a bunch of pseudo-magazines (called lifestyle) won’t do it anymore.

In response to this market pressure from radio and television (radical new technologies that newspapermen thought would have little or no impact on print), newspapers resorted to lifestyle. It made sense, a growing middle-class with more money, more leisure and more aspirations craved directions on what to wear, eat, read and visit. Of course, television has also cashed in on this middle class interest, most recently seen in the extraordinary popularity of Ten’s Masterclass Australia.

One problem with lifestyle, or what Hartigan discretely referred to as ‘highly relevant and genuinely useful’ stories in his speech yesterday, is that it sucks resources away from the high-end and investigative journalism that attracts traditional newspaper readers. I think the New York Times is about the only american newspaper that still maintains an extensive network of  international news bureaus. The rest rely on wire services.

The second problem is that lifestyle works a lot better on the Internet than it does in newspapers. The reason is that a simple google search will generate much more useful information about any lifestyle subject than a newspaper can deliver. And the Google search can be done precisely when you need it – even on your iPhone as you stand in the supermarket aisle wanting to check the ingredients for that new recipe you want to try tonight. TV has worked out how to exploit the power of the Internet in this regard by backing their lifestyle programs with information-rich websites. Again, Masterclass is a great example.

Lifestyle may have helped newspapers pre-Internet, but it’s a losing strategy for the future. Where do they fit in? Hartigan points to the great success News has had with the taste.com.au site (I’m a frequent user myself), but it works because it’s on the web, it’s got nothing to do with the future of newspapers.

I hoped Hartigan might have answered this question yesterday, but he ducked it with a string of empty homilies about what constitutes great journalism and trite remarks about the importance of the reader (no kidding). Not to mention a silly defence of tabloidism which avoids the problems with that format that pisses people off (like the fake Hanson photos and the fake email).

Hartigan does quite forcibly point out that ‘breaking stories’ drives readership and points to the example of the UK MP expenses scandal (which paradoxically the Fairfax newspapers have replicated today in relation to the gold pass plane travel scandal). He, of couse, glosses the fact that stories are also broken on TV, radio and the Internet – it’s about journalism not distribution method (like a lot of old journos, Hartigan just can’t get over the fact that journalism is not the exclusive preserve of newspapers).  But as Hartigan notes, big stories are rare and they require a lot of resources. And journalistic resources have been on the decline in response to commercial pressures and the ‘lifestyle’ strategy.

Deceptively, Hartigan then goes on to have a slap at Google and Yahoo and other aggregators, without admitting the amount of traffic his sites get from these aggregators. Some newspapers get nearly half their online readership from aggregators. This leads him into a tiresome and predictable attack on bloggers etc. He’s completely wrong, of course, the success of many blogs is that their content is far more expert and better informed than the content in newspapers. I’m thinking here of a vast array of blogs written by professional economists, scientists, etc. Many of these people, btw, regularly provide content for newspapers and use their blogs to overcome the space and search / archive limitations of newspapers. Many bloggers know that it is not an either / or proposition.

Newspapers simply can’t compete with the quality (and quantity) of content on these sites. He is right that too many of them (us) spend too much time worrying about, and responding to, newspapers. But I think that is just a transitional phenomenon, as bloggers, and the blogosphere, matures it will lose some of its obsessive interest in newspapers.

But if the content on sites like Crikey and blogs is all so bad why is Hartigan so worried about it? His concern betrays the threat they, collectively, pose for his business. Conversely, he fails to understand just how important these sites, like the aggregators, are in driving traffic, and interest, in newspaper sites. After all this time, Hartigan still seems to resist the potency of the search / link power of the Internet. Strange.

Hartigan is right to identify great journalism as the last, best hope for the future of newspapers. Reading his speech, I’m not convinced that News or anyone else has the business model or the courage to invest the sums that would be required to deliver enough great journalism to slow the steady decline of newspapers.

Asked wolfram alpha ‘What is truth?’ Answer: ‘Additional functionality for this topic is under development’. The search goes on.

I tried it and found that you can also leave your email address and be ‘notified when it is ready?’.

5. Wearing obscurely geeky T-shirts to “normal” places - Every geek has at least a few of these; don’t try to deny it. We love them, because we get the jokes and we know that only other geeks will get them, too. Unfortunately, they can make our less geeky significant others feel a bit conspicuous when out with us—or maybe they feel the geekiness will rub off on them, I’m not quite sure. Still, I feel that if I have to occasionally let my daughter wear a Hello Kitty shirt out of the house, I can wear myshirts from ThinkGeek.

one big shock to come out of the detailed research is that the peak rush hour, when average web speeds slow to a crawl, is in fact Sunday between 5pm and 6pm.

some businesses have discovered that Twitter is an effective way of communicating with consumers. Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) says Twitter has produced $1 million in revenue over the past year and a half through sale alerts. People who sign up to follow Dell on Twitter receive messages when discounted products are available the company’s Home Outlet Store. They can click over to purchase the product or forward the information to others.

Dell started experimenting with Twitter in March of 2007 after the South by Southwest conference, an annual tech/music festival in Austin, Texas. Conference attendees could keep tabs on each other via a stream of Twitter messages on 60-inch plasma screens set up in the conference hallways. There are now 65 Twitter groups on Dell.com, with 2,475 followers for the Dell Home Outlet Store.

“A million dollars isn’t a lot of money, but it shows that people want to sign up for feeds,” says Bob Pearson, head of communities and conversation for Dell. Pearson is a big fan of Twhirl, a free desktop client for that lets users manage feeds from Twitter and other popular microblogging sites (laconi.ca, Friendfeed and seismic).

It seems to me the responsible thing for the news industry to do, while it is laying off its reporters and editors and the rest, is to help us come up with a Plan B — what we will do for news once all that is gone.

Apart from the absurdity of such a ‘responsibility’, Winer’s comment is also an indication that no-one knows what will happen to the media in the future except that big changes are coming and that our media landscape will be much more diversified than ever before bcause of the emergence of new voices on the Internet.

The notion that no-one really knows what the future will look like was re-inforced for me last week at the future of journalism conference.

It is not even clear to me that the exisiting media will disappear anytime soon. The recent spate of speculation has been, in part, provoked by the financial problems facing the NY Times.

Newspapers are the heritage media most underthreat, largely because of the massive loss of classified advertising. Classifieds are actually more effective online than on paper. Newspapers also have a problem with time and keeping their sites fresh throughout the day (and night) but they are rapidly adjusting to that with, among other things, the use of video and bloggers.

While the growth of the Internet is making the market for advertising more competitive, there is still little to suggest that television and radio is going to adjust soon.  After a period of denial, TV and radio are also now moving fast to embrace the Internet.

Moreover, the audience for a post-media environment is still very small. Miniscule, in fact, as this comment from Brian Robinson on Jeff Jarvis’ blog puts it, and I quote it in full:

This all sounds very erudite, and very analytical. But nowhere in all of this is there any idea about how to feed the bigger audience for news and information. The assumption is that everyone is online reading all of the blogs and twitters and links and God-knows what else there will be in the future, and then recompiling everything for themselves to come up with the news of the day.

Guaranteed that does not describe the real audience for news other than the uber-nerds that read blogs like this (myself included) and who maybe blog and twitter themselves. The real world, even the so-called Internet generation, doesn’t have much time for that. That’s why the biggest sites in terms of traffic remain the BBC, Guardian, Times, NY Times, WPost etc. — people know they can go there and get a compilation of stuff that gives them a good idea of what’s going on.

In what you describe above, where is the idea that these readers will be better served by the info age? In the UK when I was growing up, you had the intellectual papers and then the tabloids which (no surprise) were the best read of the lot. They may have been lurid and sensational, but they provided good snapshots of the bigger stories of the day along with the crappy stuff. How is anything that you propose going to address this audience — or is journalism not bothered with them anymore?

Finally, where in all of the stuff you say is the word story? You speak of links and opinion and organization and blah, blah, but where is the discussion about what story means in the current scenarios for news? People don’t read links, they read stories. And for the great mass of readers — outside of the nerds — that still holds true. What I see here is the fracturing of story, not a way to tell a better one. Or do I have that wrong?

Excellent stuff, Brian.

Unless, we can have a post-media that serves the needs of everyone, the whole audience, than the heritage media will continue to not only exist but also to be far more relevant than either the most-read bloggers and twitterers.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Huffington says flat out that if it wasn’t for the Internet, Obama would not be president. Trippi notes that Obama’s YouTube spots gathered an aggregate of 14.5 million viewing hours. The Internet was used by candidate previously, he said, noting the Howard Dean campaign, but Obama really leveraged it fully with online video, blogging, social networking and fundraising.

The panelists also note how mainstream media tends to fail in politics, simply reporting on what each candidate says without saying who’s right or wrong. The blogosphere, they say (particularly Trippi and Huffington), tends to call out factual inaccuracies better than mainstream media.