a personal blog about technology, communications and other stuff that interests me
[Cross-posted from the High Road Blog]
IT World Canada just announced that it has acquired IT Business Group from Transcontinental. That means ComputerWorld Canada and Computing Canada will be part of the same family. For how long? IT World Canada confirmed seven lay-offs in the press release but added there would be “no additional personnel changes as a result of the purchase”. No details yet on the future of all the publications and digital brands. IT World Canada’s president Andrew White made the following comment:
“Over the coming weeks, we will be finalizing the integration of the companies, and reviewing the product portfolios for future synergies. In the meantime, we will maintain all existing properties and work with our clients to ensure a smooth transition over the coming weeks and months.”
The acquisition will strengthen IT World Canada’s position in the market (I am especially interested to see what kind of digital strategy the combined powerhouse will embark on). Depending on the extent of the “future synergies”, it may also leave the Canadian IT community with less opportunity to get business technology news from different media sources. This begs the question: will we see another media company (or blogging network) step up?
Maybe one of the large American technology business sites will consider creating a Canadian site to get a share of the local online advertising dollars. Red Herring announced some kind of Canadian presence a while ago. CNET already operates international sites in Asia, Australia and several European countries. It has all the technology infrasctructure in place. Why not hire a few journalists and add Canada to the portfolio (again)?
Maybe other Canadian media properties, like Canoe or Globetechnology.com, will look at beefing up both enterprise-focused content and Canadian stories in their technology sections?
Or will we see even more independent bloggers and news sites pop up in Canada? Former National Post tech reporter Mark Evans is blogging away with his two tech blogs and a podcast series (together with Kevin Restivo). On the telecom/VoIP side, we have people like Alec Saunders and Jon Arnold covering the community. And there are many more.
IT World Canada is positioning itself for long-term success as an important voice in Canada’s thriving technology community. With more editorial staff it has the chance to provide even more breadth and depth in coverage. But there is room for more voices – corporate or independent.
Read the press release here.
“Post och Inrikes Tidningar” (PoIT), the world’s oldest current newspaper has discontinued its print edition as of January 1, 2007 and is now an Internet-only edition at PoIT.org. Established in 1645 as the official newspaper of Sweden’s national government, it had lost a lot of readers in recent years, according to Der Spiegel (in German).
Near the end of the Thirty Years’ War, Swedish Queen Christina and Chancellor Axel Oxenstierna wanted to use PoIT to explain to its people “what all the money was spent on”. Over the centuries it turned from an outlet for the government’s official view into a full blown newspaper with reports on epidemics, the exchange rate for Swedish currency, weather reports, poetry and novels, and then was mostly focused on being “the country’s official notification body for announcements like bankruptcy declarations or auctions” (from the Wikipedia entry). The last print edition on December 29, 2006, was published with a circulation of only about 1,500.
Rather than viewing it as another proof point for the decline of print media, I’d say in this case the glass is half full. The Internet is a godsend for these types of official notification publications: the official function works just as well online. But it costs less public money.
(Disclaimer: I don’t speak Swedish; my only sources were Spiegel Online and Wikipedia)
More podcasts: ITBusiness.ca debuts a new weekly podcast series which will feature “conversations with vendors, with IT managers and CIOs, industry analysts and our newsroom colleagues”.
Less readers: Circulation for big U.S. Metro newspapers continues to decline. It is the fourth consecutive semi-annual report to register a drop, according to Editor & Publisher. Only three of the top 25 papers reported an increase.
Same old (now online): Toronto’s top three mayoral candidates have all posted videos to YouTube, the Toronto Star reports. So who will be the first to open a campaign office in Second Life? Sigh.
Ryan Anderson over at The New PR has a great post about how “we’re married to our media of choice” and slow to adapt to change.
I just read an old Time Magazine article from 1929 called “Radio into Talkies” about radio and television pioneer David Sarnoff. It talks about Radio Corporation of America’s change from “communications company” to “entertainment company”. RCA entered the entertainment business as an outsider because David Sarnoff saw the potential of the “talkies” while many of the established entertainment companies were still lingering somewhere between silent movies and talking cinema. He went on to grow RCA into a radio and television empire (also see his Wikipedia entry). A lot of his entertainment competitors went under while others were able to adapt and change.
Today, it is the news(paper) business that is changing. I don’t know if blogging and online formats necessarily mean certain death to print newspapers (the death of radio has been announced repeatedly since the 1950s). But one thing is still the same after almost 80 years: established players are afraid of change and it still takes visionaries like David Sarnoff to drive change.
I think we’re at a stage where more and more newspapers are switching their priorities to put more emphasis on online editions. The next step will be that they treat print editions as an afterthought and, to Ryan’s point, we will probably see an established newspaper switch to online-sooner than later. But it will be just as interesting to watch the ongoing development of existing online-only players and blogging networks to see if one of them can become as strong a brand as, for example, the New York Times.
The Time article from 1929 includes a great quote by David Sarnoff: “While the sylvan mouse-trap maker is waiting for customers and his energetic competitor is out on the main road, a third man will come along with a virulent poison which is death on mice and there will be no longer any demand for mouse-traps.”
He was talking about how phonograph makers adapted to radio while the “pre-radio phonograph is absolutely dead”. Today, it could be somebody like Steve Jobs (iPod vs. radio) or maybe Michael Arrington (blogging vs. newspapers) making similar statements. Visionaries – right or wrong – are still in demand, especially when the rest of us are still trying to figure out what’s good and bad about the changes we’re experiencing.
We’ll see how the newspaper business will develop but in the meantime, I agree with Ryan that “it’s important to remember that those who accept change have the biggest successes and the biggest failures. Mediocrity is rarely rewarded either way.”
Totally pointless - Marketing Magazine’s article on youth loyalty marketing mentions my High Road colleague Heather Steele and provides an example of our digital marketing and social media work for clients.
Podcast consulting for Mark Evans – David Jones and Ed Lee are smart people. This is the 2.0 version (or ”NGT” version?) of great relationship-building with journalists.
BBC News has interesting article about the future of advertising and some of the new technologies that could be used to create “personal” and “interactive” experiences. One example is the use of facial recognition software to determine whether the person staring at an outdoor/subway ad space is male or female, which would lead to different ads being served up. More on the BBC website.
I’d be interested to read more about the future of online advertising, too. I can still count on one hand the number of times I have clicked on a Google or MSN ad in the last three years.
Statscan today realeased the findings of a survey on “The Internet and the way we spend our time”. Most of the findings aren’t really surprising. But I found it interesting that heavy users watch about the same amount of television as non-users. So the Internet isn’t really replacing television as a favourite past time. I must be an exception.
(via The Star)
I like what my German hometown paper NGZ is doing. They have embraced blogging and are taking it a step further in a back-to-the-future kind of way. NGZ and sister publication Rheinische Post launched a “reader-to-reader” portal called Opinio in early 2005. Readers can post their own articles about a broad range of topics. More than a year later, they have contributed 14,000 articles.
The kicker is that editors select the best articles and publish them once a week in the print edition of the newspapers and every two weeks in a dedicated magazine supplement. The prospect of having their own words and photos appear in print seems to appeal to many people, and is an additional incentive to join the Opinio online community.
Opinio was developed by Boogie Medien for Rheinische Post. If you know of other newspapers with similar ideas let me know. Here in Canada, the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star and the National Post all do something or other with blogs on their sites now, and all three employ journalists who have started personal weblogs related to their beat. But it would be interesting to see a Canadian newspaper launch a blog-to-print portal like Opinio.
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martinhofmann.net is the personal blog and web playground of Martin Hofmann. I live in Toronto and work 
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