"I can’t tell you what products and services will be available in five years. I have some ideas, but it is nonsense to guess. The only thing we know is the speed of change is increasing, we have to be flexible and adapt." In the US, we lost young readers of newspapers 30 years ago and we’ve been trying like heck to get them back. I don’t think we can. The days when young people get their news from a print product are not over, but we won’t be able to reverse the trend. So let’s stop trying and engage them instead with our online products. Online gives us a fresh opportunity to engage young readers who we lost a long time ago." "What I wouldn’t say is that older people are newspaper oriented and younger people are digital oriented. That’s too simplistic. We increasingly, when we can, buy our placement in news in a consolidated fashion, because the consumer is a combination of traditional and cyber, national and emotional, wired and physical. The consumer is not either, but both." "Media is in a state of flux. The internet is changing the way we recreate, socialise, get information and entertain. It is changing all media, not just newspapers. The good news for newspapers is, their websites are among the leading websites in the local markets, so we have something to build on." "I think that citizen journalism has just begun, but it is here to stay, with all those mobile phones. It is something you can tap into as newspapers because it isn’t competition for journalism, it’s just multiplying the number of sources." "We’re running and chasing new developments day in and day out, but maybe we’re running in the wrong direction." "Newspapers have a core role in the world, and that is to present a picture of the entire world, and help our readers navigate through it." "Failures are inevitable and newspaper companies have to have enough strategies to ensure that the inevitable failures are minimal." "When I think about newspapers in the future, I can see so many types of newspapers. The expectations are different for each type about what we’ll get from them. I’m a heavy newspaper reader, I take three newspapers at home and I expect something different from each one. I think that will be the same in the future." "Everybody will be our competitor in the future -- from bloggers to new players to the guy with a web cam in his garage. What we have to do in the face of even tougher competition is to produce better content, more flexible products, more interesting and appealing and interesting products and to raise the bar on both quality and credibility. |
