Don't be evil.
In case you did not see this when it was still “news” (as opposed to two-and-a-half-week-old food for thought), Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt offered his thoughts on how newspapers need to change and what they will look like in the future while at the Guardian’s Activate 2010 Summit:
“they’re replacing analogue dollars with digital cents, and a lot of people are losing their jobs as a result. It’s much less bad here in Britain, perhaps because of the history of newspapers here, but in the US there are unhappy people who are losing audience at a faster and faster rate.”
I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit I had never really considered the differences between newspaper cultures in the two bastions of the English language, but apparently others have. Ah, but maybe this is just an American newspaperman pining for the good ol’ days—a June 17 report from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development presented by paidcontent.org shows that UK newspapers have suffered the most dramatic circulation declines of any country outside the United States since 2007. In fact, UK circulation has fallen by 25 percent between 2007-09, second only to the US, where the decline was 30 percent. Greece (20 percent), Italy (18 percent) and Canada (17 percent) have also seen noted dropoffs.
Less bad? Sure. “Much less bad” as Schmidt claims? The data say not so much.
“What does the newsreading experience look like many years from now? I think it’s delivered to a digital device, which has text, obviously, but also colour, and video, and the ability to dig very deeply into what you are supplied with. At the moment we have readers, but it’s not intelligent enough; newspapers often tell me what I already know. We’ll have advertising products that are much more media-centric. The most important thing is that it will be more personalised.”