This past year has been year full of a lot of great learnings, of course that comes at some type of price to all organizations. The global recession has had an impact on every possible industry, but for the purpose of this story I want to focus on media.
Towards the start of the year many headlines talked about death of print media. With increasing costs to run a print publication we s
aw many traditional media organizations become acquired or shut down operations all together. Canadian media outlets such as Globe and Mail, Canwest and the Toronto Star have suffered numerous set backs this year with potential strikes, low financial numbers and massive lay offs.
In 2009 I was very surprised with IT World Canada’s decision to shut down two of its web-based publications Mac World Canada and PC World Canada, saying they wanted to focus more on their core products. Two weeks after Publisher Yasmin Ranade made the announcement the site is still receiving comments from readers and vendors, all who are fans of the great work that Yasmin has done to turn idea into product.
As we turn our attention towards the United States, Rupert Murdock, CEO of News Corporation (which owns the New York Times and a number of other media organizations ) has made a number of headlines as he has been saying for months that his publications are looking to move towards a paid model with their online versions. This has triggered many other publications around the globe to also look at how they can keep revenues coming in while still managing to attract readers as the model of just having advertising as an option is pretty much dead (link to B5).
A major shift is coming to the world of media as we know it. Free media, or should I say free-quality media content will continue to be a thing of the past as the wall goes us to separate paying vs. non-paying readers. As more and more consumers adopt smartphones as their primary device we will see more news aggregators increase their offering such as Toronto-based Viigo. Viigo has consistently been one of the top five download Blackberry applications, with its handy application that allows a user to subscribe to a news outlets content.
Free media is officially on the endangered species list.
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