ICH MARKE DU JANE

I’ve been thinking a lot about the second last question in the video from Eric Schmidt’s speech at the annual convention of the Newspaper Association of America (webcast here). In my personal opinion, the questions sums up a lot of problems and disconnect between publishers and the web as well as its readers:

The querist asks Schmidt on his opinion on readers beingmore and more satisfied with the combination of a headline and an extract / summary instead of reading the full story. However, the way he phrases the question he very precisely and knowingly questions the rationality of his own audience (consumers). He describes Google as an aggregator driving this trend, a trend we are currently seeing in its purest form on Twitter.

To me personally the entire thought is just odd. How can you (a) question your audience how its uses your product and (b) have the arrogance to even question the people that pay your bills.

I can’t see Apple questioning me because I don’t use certain functionalities of it’s iPhone or Porsche questioning its buyers when they don’t drive 260km/h while Porsche put so much engineering investment into to car to get up to this speed.

Back in the (publisher’s) good old days, the problem that’s driving the question simply did not exist. Consumers simply had to buy an entire newspaper or magazine just to read those stories that mattered to them. This sucked for the reader (I for example read about 20% of a magazine, the rest I don’t care about) while it did not really affect the publisher. Good for me, this changed and I can now choose what I am willing to pay for. At the same time, a headline and summary often is enough for me to find out if the piece of content is relevant to me and whether I want to continue reading. I personally love this freedom…

Lastly – and here it gets bizarre – this is someone questioning people to be satisfied with summaries who lives of summaries. Journalism itself to me is a form of shortened summary of a much bigger picture. Does Angela Merkel complain that I don’t follow all here speeches and actions? Does my favorite football club complain that I don’t follow them every day and instead read the newspaper to find out whats going on or how they did in their last game? Not that I am aware of it … so why is the newspaper industry questioning me?

Tags: google, Journalism, Newspapers

This entry was posted on Monday, April 13th, 2009 at 08:53 and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.