ICH MARKE DU JANE

One of the topics I’ve been following over the recent weeks and months is the change and challenges google, twitter, blogs etc are creating for the traditional newspaper and journalism industry. Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, took a stand last week and gave a speech along with a brief Q&A session at the annual convention of the Newspaper Association of America (available as a webcast here). In his speech he gives an overview of his believes and predictions on how information sharing and the newspaper industry will evolve.

Schmidt sees a significant change to the existing concept of the newspaper of record, the traditional close connection of a paper to it’s constant (e.g. daily) readers. The concept of newspaper of record will have a hard time to withstand the innovation currently taking place as people are less tied to one source of information – instead looking for information valuable to them from trusted sources.

As a basic credo, Google is thus looking to come up with information that you trust (to become a trusted source itself). According to Schmidt, newspapers are existing brands that people trust – a very valuable position to build upon but which should be treated carefully.

During one point he describes how you have to know and understand your readers on an individual level. Understand what he / she was interested in yesterday or five minutes ago and offer content accordingly. This along with the second component of what he calls the "community of information", the topics that have value to the people around me, will shape news aggregation in the future. These two combined will create a constant stream of entertainment covering news, information, gossip, television radio and so on. It’s really interesting when he describes his vision, because at some point I got the impression he is talking about Twitter.

If you don’t have the time to watch the entire speech, I recommend you just jump ahead and listen to the Q&A session in the end. Pretty much sums it up well. During the speech, Schmidt jumps topics rather quickly which makes it sometimes hard to follow his points, but still a really interesting speech…!

Tags: google, Newspapers

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 12th, 2009 at 11:19 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.