Wednesday 5 September 2007

Is old news still good news?


Last year I was invited to give a lecture on the internet and advertising at Melbourne University.

One of the areas I touched on in my talk, was how newspapers are becoming less and less relevant to younger people.

I posed the question, why would you pay to read something that you probably read for free on the internet 24 hours earlier?

Most of the kids in the lecture theatre said they didn't and wouldn't.

One of my slides showed a front page from the Herald Sun proclaiming Australia had set a world record cricket score.

My next slide was a screen shot from one of the online news sights on the same day.

It carried the startling news that despite setting the record score, Australia had in fact lost.

This news didn't appear on the back page of the following day's newspaper until a full 36 hours after the event.

This lag between news breaking and appearance in print was highlighted for me again this week when I posted my Around The Blogosphere article.

You see the print deadline for the magazine is two months prior to going to print.

I'd never given it a second thought, as this is pretty standard in the world of magazine publishing.

In the blogosphere however we post it as and when we see or hear it.

Which is why it felt a little odd getting positive comments for something that drew on material that was now not just yesterday's news, but several months ago news.