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Change or Perish Are the print media's days finally numbered? By ERIC ELLIS September 14, 1999 Web posted at 8 a.m. Hong Kong time, 8 p.m. EDT Are newspapers and magazines dying? Lots of tech writers, media's newly minted élite, seem to think so. Now they've got as evidence the tablets handed down by one of their Great Gods, Intel chairman Andy Grove. "Nothing sharpens the awareness of the situation like the sight of the gallows," Grove recently told a horrified (and skeptical) gathering of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. The executioner? The Internet of course.
But Grove, himself rather good at making billions, is not a man whose opinions are to be ignored. "Newspapers are caught in the vise of two trends," he said, with their readership lured online and their ad base migrating to auction sites like eBay. "They need to create a product that I, the reader, won't want to put down." He even employs Net jargon in his prescription: they need to become "very sticky." The Net handles for next to nothing the two most expensive and unwieldy components of the print media business: printing (felling and processing endless quantities of Finnish pine) and distribution (moving truckloads of heavy papers along highways and low roads). Anticipating the trend, U.S. publishing group Knight-Ridder recently moved its head office from Miami to Silicon Valley. What does this mean for Asia? It means regional newspapers and media must, as the overused Silicon Valley term puts it, "get with the program" or be swept out of the game. With added competition out there, it is no longer acceptable for newspapers merely to deliver phony news--not false news per se but tailored news that compliant editors rationalize as essential for "nation-building," while nervously eyeing the hotline to the PM or president's office. Singapore, for one, seems to be getting the message. The flagship Straits Times isn't suddenly a ripping read yet, but it is subtly changing. Recent riots in neighboring Batam were prominently displayed, as have been articles on the East Timor debacle. As editor in chief Cheong Yip Seng told me recently, "We have no choice but to change, to adapt to the new infotech world. If people don't like the Straits Times they can now read the New York Times." The skeptics' last line of defense: Web publishing ultimately will be undone by the three B's-the bus stop, the bedroom and the bathroom, places where much (most?) newspaper reading takes place. To that the techies respond: "E-ink" and talk of impregnated plastic sheets updated via Net transmissions. Too weird? So was the fax, once.
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