Wednesday, March 29, 2006

Guardian editor on the end of newspapers

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger spoke to the Royal Society of Arts in London a couple of weeks ago on the subject "Newspapers in the age of blogs".

The speech was blogged extensively by Mike Butcher at mbites:

"The Guardian's editor is almost certainly unique amongst British newspaper editors as having regularly supped with start-ups and Web 2.0 companies in Silicon Valley. He is trying to figure out, understandably, how his newspaper should deal with the pincer movement of the terminal decline in newspaper readership and the loss of display and classified advertising revenue - all thanks to the Internet. [...]

The picture certainly looks grim. Revenue is walking out of newspapers, into Internet portals and niches titles.

At the same time, Rusbridger outlined, there is a gap between the time it is taking newspapers to develop their own web sites and the surge in internet revenues among the boisterous technology start-ups and the leviathans of Google, Yahoo! and MSN."

An MP3 of Rusbridger's speech is here.

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