“Trying to assess the true importance of the Internet now is like asking the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk if they were aware of the potential of American Airlines Advantage Miles,” said The New York Times Publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr.
Sorry, but Yahoo!, MySpace, Google, Flickr, YouTube or Facebook, for example, are quite mature developments and the slow response of many traditional media publishers shows that they are not the Wright brothers of the Internet.
Today, The New York Times stock is lower than ever.
Around $18 right now.
Going down again and again after Morgan Stanley sold its nearly 10.4 million shares in the newspaper.
The newsroom is producing a first-class product, but the business management is doing a third-class job.
The Wall Street Journal interviews him.
It’s a good one.
Rupert Murdoch at his best!
Just the final Q&A:
WSJ: The Tribune company was shopped around for quite a while.
Mr. Murdoch: Yeah, but there weren’t any buyers.
WSJ: There was one in the end.
Mr. Murdoch: For $90 million. Risk. That’s in the figures …
WSJ: Why didn’t you do it?
Mr. Murdoch: Don’t want to spend the rest of my life going through that, getting rid of people, ugly. I think they’re in decline, they can fire a few hundred people everywhere, save a couple of hundred million dollars … I guess they will have a billion a year to pay down the debt, that’s what it sounds like. No, a bit less … I would have thought that, although the decline in readership … will probably go on…
WSJ: They’re all going to MySpace.
Mr. Murdoch: I wish they were. They’re all going to Facebook at the moment.
(Via John Duncan)
Two great front pages from two different editions of the same paper.
This is serious stuff.
Brilliant design.
Brilliant illustrations.
Brilliant marketing.
That’s why this quality, popular Austrian newspaper is so successful.
Because they pay attention to women.
And to young people.
It’s as simple as that.
Try to find similar front pages around the world …
… you won’t.
So… let´s not blame TV, Internet or MySpace.
They are not killing us.
We are.