As I looked over some of my feeds in my RSS reader today I cam across a piece written by Marc Andreessen about the deathwatch of the New York Times. His sarcasm in the piece makes it a fun read in spite of the message. His take as I read it is that unless changes are made in the way they are doing business, they will soon be out of business. I tend to agree with Mark Evans piece that the New York Times must change the way they do business or perhaps the deathwatch will be a credible idea. We have already experienced the death of a newspaper after 126 years in business.
As traditional advertising takes a turn in its direction, older traditional media will have to adapt to go where the money is and change their business models to keep revenues that they are losing to online media.
Absolutely true, Jim. Our lesson today in my College Reading/Writing class is about internet searches, and the textbook emphasized the fact that a business without an ever-changing webpage/blog is a business that is NOT going to be “found” via a google search for a keyword.
Many businesses believe that if they have a webpage at all, they’re as ‘internet savvy’ as they need to be. WRONG. A static webpage is pretty much worthless in this day and age of keyword searches. It is the business with the ever-changing page that will be found by a searcher/customer, and Google will elevate these pages quickly.
In other words, a savvy business will hire a writer to make sure its pages and keyword locations change frequently and regularly.
As for a newspaper: I haven’t purchased one in four years. Everything I want out of the news is online.