I read with interest this evening a post at ValleyWag about Forbes magazine, who have been running two operations for the last several years - both in Fifth Avenue - one dealing with the print publication of “Forbes Magazine”, and the other dealing with it’s online incarnation - “Forbes.com”. The staff do not speak, communicate or socialise. They may as well be on seperate continents.
It would appear that those holding the perse strings, Elevation Partners, are unwilling to let such a situation continue, and are in the process of engineering a take-over in all but name. Forbes.com are moving into the Forbes building. Their boss will become the Forbes boss. Many of the Forbes old timers will be shown the door, and all the writers will write for both web and print.
Quite apart from the divergent writing styles required for web and print media, this is an important news story. It marks the somewhat public beginning of the end for print media that has been coming for quite some time.
Newspapers have been in trouble for a long time now. As the interent has become ubiquitous in middle-income households across the developed world, advertising revenue has left print media and been funnelled into the net - with the likes of Google, Yahoo and Federated Media delivering targetted advertising campaigns direct to potential customers with analytics that print media can only dream of.
Concerns about the rainforest mean people are reluctant to buy print newspapers and magazines - regardless of the fact that computers and electricity do far more harm to the environment than printed media.
The explosion of affordable, connected devices such as smart phones and “netbook” computers has lured the various eschelons of the intelligencia away from print media too. Where business people once read The Economist, the Wall Street Journal, or the Financial Times, they are now watching live stock tickers in their hand, scrolling through RSS feeds tailored specifically for them, and listening to podcasts while commuting to and from work.
It would seem that “Old Media” has to either evolve or die. The Huffington Post is perhaps the best example of a news organisation embracing the internet. The New York Times is also fighting to adapt.
The coming months and years are going to be interesting. In the same way that computers invaded the printing and typesetting industries twenty years ago, they are now invading the delivery medium of the written word.
This article is cross posted from ThoughtCafe - a new online magazine format website featuring the writing of a variety of people from all over the world.