Eli Noam: Outlook 2010: How newspapers can manage the "free generation"

Posted by Dominique Lewis Tuohy on June 5, 2006 at 1:57 PM

Columbia University’s Eli Noam stirred up some curiosity in the media industry in 2005 prophesizing that newspapers will evolve into “news integrators.” That curiosity was sated at the 13th World Editors forum where Noam made the keynote speech.

In keeping with the theme of the “free generation”, the bearded academic reflected on Rupert Murdoch’s now famous speech at the American Society of Newspaper Editors in April 2005, saying that “Young people are not abandoning print. They are abandoning news.” In this respect, newspapers must undergo a “structural transformation” if they are to thrive in the digital age.

Noam pointed out the basic business foundations that have supported traditional news organizations for decades are being undermined and that “It is difficult to get readers to pay for news content which they can get readily for free from other providers.”

He said that “Online and print newspapers depend on each other symbiotically,” and that “Today, the online world feeds on the print world. But like a cancer, it can kill its host.”

So what can newspapers do?

- Focus on core competency
- Differentiate
- Customize
- Restructure
- Consolidate
- Innovate

After newspapers have taken these steps, Noam predicted that “four archetypes of ‘newspaper’ firms” would arise:

- Specialist content providers
- Large bundlers of small specialist firms
- Vertically integrated content bundlers
- Pure bundlers

…all of which would eventually result in a network model in which the “news organization assembles the elements it needs rather than produce them.” But at the same time, Noam emphasized the fact that just about anyone can perform this function on the Internet.

This type of network model will impact journalists, causing a de-professionalization, commodification, and more accountability. It will also affect content. Multimedia, blogs, wikis, open source, participatory media will all become an integral part of the news landscape.

In the end, Noam concluded that people aren’t necessarily abandoning news, but they are straying from classic pay plans. The plethora of media “competition for (consumers’) attention drives down prices to zero or near it.” Life for newspapers is thus becoming a lot more complicated.