Can Murdoch save the newspaper industry by making people pay to read news online? is the headlines that read few days back in DNA. Rupert Murdoch a financial wizard, his very sure he can. But, there are people who think otherwise and are very skeptical of this turn of event of shifting right from getting a 50 odd page newspaper at your doorstep from your newspaper boy, to getting news online in real time.
Its been 15 years since newspapers have gone web , but they still haven't leveraged on it to acclaim on its wealth. They still haven't got the hang of it. Newspapers are as viral as it can be and the best place to go viral is online, where people starve to get news. If you notice the recent H1N1 flu hitting various parts of Mexico was first submitted on twitter in real time and since then my email has been flooded with precautions to stay safe from the viral flu.
A newspaper agency can save millions by transferring their paper online, as the man power will reduce drastically as it will save on newspaper boys and transportation, bu this will cause a huge unemployment for newspaper shops all over. But this is a huge step to be taken if u want to survive with your newspaper.
Having a online portal of news is not a easy task as it cannot battle with money made on Classifieds , but there are ways online that a newspaper website can make money like: advertisements , google ads, widgets , sign ups (subscriptions), rating, comments, and of course pay to read news online.
Online revenues have been stagnant since a decade cause of newspaper not developing its website. We get scanned sheets on a newspaper website and you can go comment and rate an article. A revolution can only begun where we can we can a REAL Time newspaper website, which is where a reader can directly contact with the author or writer of a particular article and share his views. You have to admit one does not read a newspaper page by page , so online we can have "favorite column" - to get feeds daily into a email.
In 20-30 years time it is unlikely that we will be getting any news on paper , its might as well we make our online portal a user friendly and maybe give it a Layout of a newspaper and use it to the most social media format available till date.
Article: "Murdoch to the rescue" DNA Newspaper dated 14th August , page 12
