Google News is not free advertisers pay

Only the paranoid will survive the change in the news business. Whining articles from academics are another sign the end is near for newspapers and media giants.

Story from Delaware Online

The change in reader pattern from a newspaper to Internet reader is changing the landscape forever. Newspapers are whining about it and pining for the old days of high profit.

Andy Grove the founder of Intel said every business faces strategic inflection points – the point at which they make the right decision to change or not.

“… a strategic inflection point is a time in the life of a business when its fundamentals are about to change. That change can mean an opportunity to rise to new heights. But it may just as likely signal the beginning of the end.

Strategic inflection points can be caused by technological change but they are more than technological change. They can be caused by competitors but they are more than just competition. They are full-scale changes in the way business is conducted, so that simply adopting new technology or fighting the competition as you used to may be insufficient. They build up force so insidiously that you may have a hard time even putting a finger on what has changed, yet you know that something has. Let’s not mince words: A strategic inflection point can be deadly when unattended to. Companies that begin a decline as a result of its changes rarely recover their previous greatness. Only the Paranoid Survive

Newspapers are losing money because their new generation of readers have not subscribed. Almost everyone from 20 to 40 is reading the news on-line and often with a smart phone like the blackberry or iPhone.

Advertising revenue is dropping and newspapers are cutting back trying to avoid bankruptcy.

In the meantime, some papers are streamlining and developing profitable on-line news outlets. Others are talking about toll-gating for news which means only subscribers get the stories.

Toll-gating won’t work since no one source controls the news. The old-line papers and networks tell us we need them but we don’t.

For instance, the story of the Iran protests was told with cell phones and cell-phone videos. Traditional journalists could only stand on the sidelines and comment.

The corporate newspapers are defending the waste in the bailout money being spent. Only the alternate press are tell the truth. Stimulus money is going to fund rich fat cats and friends of governments.

No one believes the corporate media giants. In Canada, CTV and the Globe and Mail are controlled by Bell Canada. Does anyone think Bell Canada has their best interests at heart?

They are a monopoly. Bell has a 100 + year history of reaping big profits from us. Bell also controls telephone, cell phone and internet service east of Manitoba. That is not good for the free flow of information.

Corporate media giants twist the news to suit their sponsors and advertisers. These days no one can afford to offend the almighty dollar.

Yet another article telling us how bad we are for Twittering, Facebooking, Googling and otherwise sharing news freely from Tonya M. Evans “assistant professor of law at Widener University School of Law.” Evans gets a wide following among the media and her biased opinion will be picked up and repeated until the media start believing their own PR.

Reporters, academics, lawyers and the news industry are all weighing in on what many refer to as the news reporting crisis. But the blogging, Facebook-updating, Twitter-Tweeting generation is not so convinced that a flat line for printed newspapers is a crisis at all. Rather, maybe it’s progress. And even their Blackberry-toting parents have flocked to the Internet as a leading source of free and instantaneous information over traditional print media. There is no shortage of new media content-providers poised to compete with print and online newspapers by simply hyperlinking to their content, despite recent legal battles involving search engines like Google over the propriety of such actions. Delaware Online

Evans is holding onto her old GM shares too. Times are a changing and only the swift and paranoid survive.