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Digital Futures

• Richard Sambrook
• 24 Jan 07, 03:05 PM

I am at a meeting of the WEF Media Leaders Council - editors, publishers and journalists from major news organisations - and blogs - around the world. The UK is well represented with the editors of the FT, the Telegraph, the Guardian and The Times all here as well as me. The discussion is about how media companies can adapt to the internet - the constant subject of debate for such people. It's under so I cannot report the discussion or attribute comments verbatim. However I can share some observations:
Mathias Dopfner of the German group Axel Springer AG was quoted having written:"We must be careful not to commit suicide for fear of dying". In other words media organisations should not abandon their core values in the face of huge online competition or they will die anyway.
One internet entrepreneur said "The challenge isn't content anymore. It's organising it, the architecture of content is the new challenge." He was referring to sites like Flickr and
One long-standing newspaper publisher said "Newspapers used to dominate the national conversation. Now we have to find ways to join the conversations that are going on elsewhere." In other words bloggers and others don't need national media to discuss events anymore - but to stay relevant newspapers have to join those discussions, not just stage their own.
A lot of concern is being expressed about how companies can make internet services pay when the public expect them for free. No solutions to that conundrum yet. (As one american publisher put it:"Traditional media is a slow growth - high cost business. If we don't get our investment in online to pay it will undermine the rest.")
Finally, a neat way of differentiating journalists and bloggers. "Bloggers suffer from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, journalists suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder." In other words, journalists report and move on and don't always follow up. Bloggers are obsessive, get hold of an issue and won't let go....

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