Home| YooskTV| Members| Public Figures| Features| Search| Journalists| Site Guide - FAQs|
 
  1. I'd like to ask
  3. 472 people in 178 cities are asking questions to 1,040 people
  2. Login
    Username
     
     Password
     
Will the Internet kill print and TV?

Will the Internet kill print and TV? 		Presented by
Shrikala Sane 		Submit questions by Dec 05 2008
Interview published on Dec 07 2008
Introduction

Will the Internet kill print and TV?

By Shrikala Sane for Yoosk.com

 

In today’s fast moving life, from where you would like to know your required information, favourite programmes, latest news and whatever strikes in your mind? Will it be the newspapers, TV or the Internet? Personally, the Internet seems like the only answer to satisfy all these requests.

There has been tremendous growth in the electronic media over the past twenty five years. Today, both print and television corporations are investing considerable resources in an attempt to secure a better future for their industry.

Alongside the internet, the growth of free papers in many cities means paid-for newspaper face significant competition. The print business has survived the coming of radio and television, each time adapting and altering to circumstances, and emerging as profitable as ever. When asked to David Leigh, Assistant Editor of The Guardian, by one of the Yoosk member about the areas where printed news has an edge over the news reported on the internet, his answered saying that Printed news is deeper, more considered and researched - and portable. But the current internet era is perhaps the most challenging time for print industry in the last 200 years.

Television and radio have also started facing declines in terms of viewer ships and advertising revenue. The popularity of the internet has meant that many are turning away from TV, according to analysts Jupiter Research. Their findings reveal that a quarter of internet users spent less time watching TV in favour of the internet. Now, the way in which audience receive the news has changed, too. Audiences have moved away from the idea of sitting down in front of TV or radio and watching or listening to the news at particular time. They can get their news wherever they are and via whatever device they have (e.g. mobiles, laptops, palmtops, i-phones). This trend can only continue as broadband and mobile networks become more prevalent and consumers become more tech-savvy.

 

The internet has given many good things to the world, of course: ‍websites, email, e-commerce, instant messaging, video, audio and so ‍on. All the information is available online almost for free.  The major advantage of the internet is that it is highly interactive. It needs inputs from users in order to process any information. The internet is the only media where anyone can publish his views worldwide. Organisations like BBC, encourage readers to send in ‘on the spot’ photos or videos when any news event occurs. In addition to it, there might be ‍a chance for people to write about their experience or witnessing of ‍a particular event onto any number of well-known websites (BBC, The Times, The Telegraph). There are online polls, debates, phone-in, emails and videos ‍coming from the ordinary citizen. We might end up with a world of ‍citizen journalism and lose professional (or in other words) ‍traditional journalism. This raises the question: will we ‍even get to read 'standard' news stories on the internet in the future?

 

‍BBC Deputy Director of News and Controller, Adrian Van Klaveren has ‍very prominent views on this statement. According to him, journalists’ ‍have got the dominant role as they write the story rather than only ‍commenting on it. ‍ ‍"We need the journalists, who go on location, gather all the ‍information, put lots of efforts in analysis and build the story," he ‍says. In contrast, David Leigh feels that too much competition for ‍attention leads to victory for the fastest, cheapest and noisiest ‍journalism. ‍ ‍"In effect, every citizen is now a journalist. Journalistic skills ‍are not entirely wiped out in an online world, but they are eroded ‍and, most importantly, they cannot be confined any longer to a ‍exclusive elite group," says Leigh. ‍

 

Many newspapers and television channels are putting more resources into online media in order to retain their audience. It is obvious that these organisations foresee difficulties with their traditional business in the coming years. Their major focus is to be a part of all media, carve out distinct identities of each media, format the content accordingly and reduce costs. The economic model for these organisations may be in danger if they are not able to provide what their audience want from them. To ensure the survival, all tradition media can work effectively with online media. “Different kind of content will work differently for different media” says Adrian Van Klaveren. ‍

 

The days are not far away, when we will have information everywhere, stored in gadgets ‍as well as newspapers. Organisations will wish to give their audience ‍what they want and in what format they want. To make the content ‍relevant, fulfilling the desire of the audience will be the real challenge for the ‍media.

Adrian Van Klaveren (show answers)
  1. HoaiHood asked Adrian Van Klaveren: "Is online media destroying traditional media?"
  2. Adrian Van Klaveren answers: "I think there clearly is a real change taking place in how audiences actually consume news- that people are increasingly moving away from the idea that you sit down with the news at a set time and watch..." Show more»" I think there clearly is a real change taking place in how audiences actually consume news- that people are increasingly moving away from the idea that you sit down with the news at a set time and watch it on TV at a particular moment, or you listen to the radio at a particular time, that now actually people get their news wherever and whenever they want it, in lots of different forms. So that means for those of us who produce news, what we’re actually looking to do is think how we can make our content just much more relevant to different audience groups and giving people the ability to find the particular things they are interested in, to alert them about things as they actually happen- that they don’t have to wait till the end of the day to find out about them. But also to make it much easier to find a lot of the background and analysis that we do- where in the past, that was kind of done once it was available in one place but if you missed it- you missed it. So in the future, people can get to that much more. So those are big challenges because lots of other people can do parts of all that, but what an organisation like the BBC can do, is it can actually do everything from a very fast speedy response, and alert to a story through the context and analysis, and be a platform for debate and discussion and help people get involved. And we are very well placed because we are across television radio and the web and because we’ve got large audiences we are able to offer all those different things to people. Shrikala's follow up: What strategies do you think the traditional media should adopt in order to survive? I think for the traditional media, the key thing is “What promise are we giving to our audiences?” – I think what people are still looking for is a place where they feel they can get information which they believe to be as accurate as is humanly possible, they get that information as fast as possible and its done in a spirit of fairness as well. That there is a place for information and news and analysis which is done in that kind of way- and the traditional broadcast media are very well placed to be able to continue to provide that, and if you can do that in a way which is easily accessible and which is engaging and which is available across a whole range of platforms, you’ve got something there which I think, in terms of how people live their lives and in terms of how society works as well, is of real value for the future and which there will continue to be an audience for. Shrikala: how will broadcast media, which you have to pay for, compete with online media, which of course, is all free? Yes, of course that’s true and as things stand, the BBC is very aware of this and that people don’t have a choice- if they want a television set they have to buy a license- so in a sense, we have got that luxury of that funding. Clearly, cost has a part in this, in terms of what people will consume. But I still think that there are a lot of choices that people will be able to make and a lot of diversity in terms of the types of content that they can actually pick up and I think offering people the ability to get a service which is saying actually this news is important, we’re doing it accurately and fairly and we’re doing a range of stories- I think there is a value in that and that there will be people who are willing to see money being spent on that, whether that’s coming directly from them through a license fee or whatever, then I think that’s got a place in the future. Shrikala: but free newsletters can be used to get news on the internet…. Well yep, that will happen and that’s what will place… whether you’re talking about what you’ll do online or whether you’re talking about newspapers that are given away free and so on …there is a place for that, but a lot of what that is doing is not the expensive end of journalism- of actually being able to find things out, to research them thoroughly. And with the amount being able to be spent and putting it together, I think it’s fulfilling a different set of needs really, it’s a completely legitimate set of needs, but I think there is a value in terms of saying “Actually, tell me something I didn’t know before about what is going on in the world and tell me that in a way that I find interesting, surprising and accessible”. Shrikala: so content should be interesting…. Absolutely, I mean one of the most important jobs that we’ve got is trying to find ways of making the important things interesting and that’s one of the key things that each day we are having to sit down and think about – this is important but how do we make people understand why it is important, how it matters? If you are trying to explain the credit crunch and losses at a bank or whatever…. Why does this matter to people? Why should they be concerned about it? And that’s what we’ve always got to be working on. Shrikala: So to conclude, you believe that all the medias can work together. I think that’s right. I think one of the great advantages of this age is that people do have much more choice and that you can pick up different things according to your particular needs and your particular sets of information that you are trying to acquire at that time, and there are many different ways of doing that. And I think that’s the great opening up and it’s to the benefit of audiences that they do have that choice as opposed- if you were looking back 30 years- to a set number of newspapers, very few television news bulletins and very few radio programmes. "Show less«
  3. Is this a good answer?    1    0
  4. 0 comment   |  Topic: Media   |   Email to friends
  6. Londontowner asked Adrian Van Klaveren: "Adrian, how will interactive news look in, let's say, ten years time? How much further beyond the viewers poll, phone in, e-mailed pics etc, can we realistically go?"
  7. Adrian Van Klaveren answers: "I think the role of debate within the news will be the thing that really develops. At the moment it’s possible for people to react to things whether it’s by text messages or by email but there’s not a..." Show more»" I think the role of debate within the news will be the thing that really develops. At the moment it’s possible for people to react to things whether it’s by text messages or by email but there’s not a sense of something going quickly backwards and forwards and that real exchange of ideas and how that works and I think that will change much more that people can make a point, get an instant response back, in the way that you and I would in a normal conversation. I think broadcasting will be more into that area. I think the use of video interactively is something that will grow, instead of what is essentially a text based interactive content it becomes much more video based and you can actually see the people- and it will become much more engaging to a wider audience I think, if it moves in that way. And a sense that it will be much easier to find the particular debate that you are interested in- today we are still quite led by “What is the Today programme discussing?” or “What is going on on Radio 5 Live?”, or whatever. A sense that we can actually let people set the agenda themselves more than is currently the case, that interactivity will be much more the things the audience want to talk about, as opposed to us trying to guess what we think the audience wants to talk about. Shrikala asked the follow up question: Will this affect the model of journalism – when anybody can be a journalist, will the actual art of journalism suffer? I think that’s the worry but I actually don’t think that will be the case. I think that journalism has still got a very proper and essential role. Journalism, in the end, is about finding things out – its not just about commenting on things – I mean journalism is about going away, getting information, putting it together and then making sense of it and I think that there is a role for that which people will still value hugely- that somebody is able to work out what’s actually going on in terms of how political party funding works for instance – they are going to want journalism on that, not just to say what they think about it. And that will only come from journalists who are spending the time and the effort and have the background knowledge actually to try and make sense of it. I think there is still a very important role for journalism there. "Show less«
  8. Is this a good answer?    1    0
  9. 0 comment   |  Topic: Media   |   Email to friends
  11. ryanscribe asked Adrian Van Klaveren: "Is the future of all media going to be via a one-stop service, on either a PC or TV? i.e. there won't be separate TV, PC, newspaper, etc Or will I be picking up e-books (the new Amazon invention), still..." Show more »"Is the future of all media going to be via a one-stop service, on either a PC or TV? i.e. there won't be separate TV, PC, newspaper, etc Or will I be picking up e-books (the new Amazon invention), still listening to a (admittedly digital) radio set, browsing the web and also collecting a paper in the mornings? And how the hell does the media owner pay for these?? Unlike the Beeb, most have to make a commercial success to offer these services." Show less »
  12. Adrian Van Klaveren answers: "Well the two things come together. You can access TV through your PC and you can access your PC through your TV set, you can get text on your radio – all of those sorts of things and that will continue...." Show more»" Well the two things come together. You can access TV through your PC and you can access your PC through your TV set, you can get text on your radio – all of those sorts of things and that will continue. I think actually that the crucial difference is one about the distance away from the screen you sit and I think that’s probably what the difference will be in the future – you know the kind of screen that you might have a few inches away from you – a hand held device, a mobile or whatever – and what content is right for that. There is what you might do in terms of sitting in front of a PC, there is what you might do at your desk or whatever , how you actually work there and what media you consume in that way, and then there is the rather more passive, sit back and sit quite a distance away from the screen and really be entertained, be immersed in something sort of approach. I think the convergence will be more along those lines, that you’ll still end up with those different devices and different forms of content will work for different ones there but that means thinking about it in a very different way from thinking “Oh, this is made for the web and this is made for TV.” I think those distinctions will break down and go away. Shrikala’s follow up: So you think we’ll continue to see people carrying radios and newspapers and watching the news on TV? Well, I think you will have people who are carrying a mobile device which is capable of receiving the radio and I think you can see that happening – you only have to look at the iphone and see that is the beginning of how some of that can actually come together, so you will see that happening. I think in terms of “Is there a role for newspapers in the future?” There is still a role – what newspapers are having to do is to change in terms of kind of content they offer. It becomes more about lifestyle and comment and less about news in terms of the overall package, and there’s a place for that- for people to read at weekends, when they are traveling, those sorts of times- that works and its actually quite a convenient package for being to operate in that kind of way. You know- you’ve got it in your hand and there’s a kind of aesthetic pleasure to it. So I think newspapers are having to re-invent themselves very quickly and in quite difficult circumstances but I think there is still a role for that as long as they can make the economics add up in terms of the costs of printing and distribution and so on, which is a very, very expensive business. Shrikala’s follow up: so for economic success newspapers will have to decrease distribution costs and increase advertising? Well clearly, the economic model there is under pressure in terms of what you can actually do: there is the cost of providing the content, the cost of then distributing it and what you can actually get back in terms of either advertising revenue or the actual costs of buying the publication. I think there will still be a place for that and people will find a way of making that work but they will have to change what they do in terms of the type of content, and continue to do that, and think about how you actually go about doing that – what kind of printing and distribution? "Show less«
  13. Is this a good answer?    1    0
  14. 0 comment   |  Topic: Media   |   Email to friends
  16. sunnyday asked Adrian Van Klaveren: "Which one, and why, is your news provider of choice - tv, internet, newspaper or radio?"
  17. Adrian Van Klaveren answers: "I’m not sure I’m very impartial here because I work for the BBC News so I’m terribly partial. I’ll give you the honest answer – where I tend to for choice, is still fairly BBC skewed really – if you’re..." Show more»" I’m not sure I’m very impartial here because I work for the BBC News so I’m terribly partial. I’ll give you the honest answer – where I tend to for choice, is still fairly BBC skewed really – if you’re looking at television, the main things I consume are News 24 and the 10 o’clock news from the BBC. If you look at Radio, I’m a great 5 Live fan just because of the passion and the tone that 5 Live actually brings to it. For newspapers, I’m much more likely to read all of them, there are ones which stand out, I mean actually I always like to look at the Daily Mail because I think the Daily Mail really knows its audience and there is a way into what is actually going on in Britain that you can get from the Daily Mail that you won’t get elsewhere. And I think there is something in that which makes it well worth reading each day. If you are looking at web sources I guess the other place I start apart from the BBC site is, you do look at Google News because there you’ve got such a good digest of what is being talked about, different sources for it, sometimes surprising things. And you know the power of Google News and the reasons it’s growing so fast are precisely because of that – the very easy way to get at a wide range of stories. Because of what I do, you tend to flick through a lot of them [newspapers] as opposed to just reading one. But I will often read the Times, the Mail or the Telegraph. "Show less«
  18. Is this a good answer?    1    0
  19. 0 comment   |  Topic: Media   |   Email to friends
  21. bonzo1 asked Adrian Van Klaveren: "The BBC often encourages the general public who are "on the spot" when a news event occurs, to submit pictures or video. Do you have any plans to offer payment for this content in the future and will ..." Show more »"The BBC often encourages the general public who are "on the spot" when a news event occurs, to submit pictures or video. Do you have any plans to offer payment for this content in the future and will we ever see a time when BBC users are also encouraged to write their own reports on stories?" Show less »
  22. Adrian Van Klaveren answers: "In terms of payment, generally not – we are asking people to contribute and our experience is that people are usually very keen to contribute to our coverage and be able to give their pictures, their ..." Show more»" In terms of payment, generally not – we are asking people to contribute and our experience is that people are usually very keen to contribute to our coverage and be able to give their pictures, their accounts of the events they’ve actually seen. We’ve occasionally paid for particular content if we have it exclusively and so on, and that will continue, just as we have in the past with amateur video – the only difference is that nowadays there is just much more of it around, because most people have a mobile phone with a camera attached to it and can email it directly from there. It’s just an increase in volume of that but I think the principles are that generally we don’t have plans to pay for that sort of content – there would have to be a very specific reason why that would be the right thing to do. In terms of people writing their own sort of accounts of things, I think there is a place for that. There are two ways in which that really works – there are people who are experts on stories because they’ve got personal involvement, personal experience of it. If you want to hear their accounts because that helps inform your overall understanding of the story, it makes it actually a much more rounded account if you are able, through your website, to say “And here’s an account of a person who knows about this, who has experienced it, has lived through it” or whatever. That’s a good thing to have and in terms of people who witness particular things , you know, those accounts… they don’t just need to be a short email, if somebody feels that they are able to write their own particular account of it, that can be very powerful and very valuable to us. And there is this kind of opening up of the news that you can let people have the space to be able to do that, and you do get a difference of perspectives, a difference of style and so on. I don’t by any means think that it is the entire answer of what it is that people expect from us but I think its a part of it and I think its something that we want to encourage. Shrikala: So you would ask a journalist to go through what has been written to check that it is up to the standards of the BBC? Well, I think the key thing is for people who are reading it, is to understand the basis on which that account is there. If it is an account from somebody who has sent it to us, a member of our audience, I think that’s what needs to be clear to people. I think there is a danger of us for getting into “well we’re going to moderate everything, we’re going to edit everything, we’re going to make it all the same as everything else we would do through our own journalists”. I think you’ve got to make that distinction and to say that actually, this stands there in its own right as long as there are no particular legal defamation problems or anything like that with it – we should check for that. But beyond that I think our role for that sort of account is as a publisher of it, as opposed to people who are trying to edit it and make it conform to our own particular style, our own way of doing it, for the very real fact that if we start trying to do it that way- where we are trying to edit it in lots of different ways- we won’t have the capacity to produce very many of those accounts. It won’t actually achieve the kind of opening up, the kind of democratisation if you like, that actually is the reason for doing it. Because it will be subject to our capacity to be able to edit them much better that we’re very open with the audience, “this is the basis of this, the status of it, it’s not the same as something done by one of our journalists, but we think you might be interested in reading it”. "Show less«
  23. Is this a good answer?    1    0
  24. 0 comment   |  Topic: Media   |   Email to friends
  26. sunnyday asked Adrian Van Klaveren: "I notice that the "most read" and "most emailed" stories on the BBC website are very often not the headline stories but the funny or sensational ones, so do you think that there is an argument for giving..." Show more »"I notice that the "most read" and "most emailed" stories on the BBC website are very often not the headline stories but the funny or sensational ones, so do you think that there is an argument for giving the funny and sensational stories more prominence?" Show less »
  27. Adrian Van Klaveren answers: "I think the argument is a slightly different one. I think the argument is making sure that it is possible for people to find them, that its possible to search for them, that we’ve actually made the navigation..." Show more»" I think the argument is a slightly different one. I think the argument is making sure that it is possible for people to find them, that its possible to search for them, that we’ve actually made the navigation to get to those sorts of stories as simple as we can and that’s something that we’ve been working on. You know we now have an index on our website called “Also in the news” which is the home for that kind of story because you’re absolutely right, I mean there are a lot of people who are keen to read, watch or listen to that kind of content and we have to make it possible for people to get to that and it is a part of what we do. Equally, we can do things through interactive TV in terms of offering that kind of story for people who want to find that through the menu, so I think there’s a role for us in aggregating it and making it findable. I actually think giving it more prominence….I don’t think that the vast majority of our audience feel that what we should be doing, is saying in the end that funny story about the man who was locked in the toilet is more important than what’s going on in Kosovo – they’re not expecting us to do that and actually we would be getting it wrong if we would be doing it that way. It is simply saying they do have a place in what we offer and we’ve got to make it easy for you to be able to get to those stories that we’re not ashamed of them, we don’t hide them away, they are there and for those that want them and want to bookmark it and go back to it, absolutely fine, you can do that. "Show less«
  28. Is this a good answer?    1    0
  29. 0 comment   |  Topic: Media