Dinosaur 1: Dorothy Grace Elder still doesn’t get digital media for newspapers

Couple of interesting pieces been kicking about the last few days – both of which continue to show old media’s complete and utter failure to grasp digital media for newspapers. First up, there’s a piece on All Media Scotland about a report on how Finnish financial newspaper Taloussanomat went web-only and what happened to the revenues/staffing. The original report as linked to by Compute Scotland is worth a read and I’ll come back to that in another post.

But what was of interest – for the purposes of this post – was the comment by Dorothy Grace Elder:

The City University research on a Finnish local paper which lost at least 75% revenue from readers and advertisers when it stopped printing and went online should be a wake up call to the industry. Also, it shows the folly of Governments and political bodies aiming to switch public notices and job adverts to the web, destroying more local papers. We need much more research like this in Scotland to give the results to the web-obsessed. The Finnish results are no surprise – few want to be saddled with a computer at all times to gain a scrap of news. How few can always find a plug in beyond a minority onboard top of the range trains? To gain instant access to the media, on buses, suburban trains, or at home in the toilet, garden, bedroom or kitchen, something easy and instant needs to be invented – oops! It’s known already and called A NEWSPAPER. Wake up and smell the newsprint.

Now, I like Dorothy. She’s opinionated, great for a quote (or was regarded as such when I was a reporter) and her heart is normally in the right place. But on this one she’s well out of touch.

Firstly, she criticises the Government and others for switching job adverts to online instead of staying with press. That’s fair enough, but for years that hasn’t been where people looked for jobs anyway – job centres and larger papers were looked at, not the locals. Also, as a taxpayer, should she not be wanting the council to make best use of their cash – I’d rather have a streetlight than a bunch of job ads in the Hamilton Advertiser anyday.

Her other comment also shows how she’s missing the point. For a start, laptops can run for up to five hours now without a topup, but more to the (missed) point, more and more people are using their phones for news – Blackberries, N95s, iPhones, what have you – and the screensize on them is growing and we’re going to see news apps grow. Mobile is where it is at now – and it’s frustrating to see so many people still failing to grasp web, never mind mobile.

Dorothy also talks about “To gain instant access to the media” and says newspapers are a way of doing that. Yes, but it’s old news – in some cases more than 24 hours old. Digital news is far more up to date. And what’s more important is the fact that news is still being provided – that’s why they’re called NEWSpapers and not papernews – it’s the content not the delivery medium that’s important.