Smart people don’t seem to read the local newspapers, nor any businessmen worth their salt (The Edge anyone?). As they are all pretty much biased, washed out tabloid trash.
Smart people read news online (BBC, CNN, Malaysiakini, Jeff Ooi) or read foreign papers, even those papers such as The Times of India are much better.
It seems people prefer to pay more for some decent news rather than the local papers which are only good for wrapping tomorrows nasi lemak in.
Even in the US the traditional media has shifted its paradigm toward the online medium, advertisers are pulling out of the printed papers and spending more heavily on the websites (Below the Line).
Look at the Washington Post for example, it’s an amazing site with a blog, trackbacks and integrated Technorati features.
According to a new forecast by Forrester Research, as much as 8 percent of all advertising spending will shift online by the year 2010. Much of this shift will come at the expense of tradional media channels such as magazines, direct mail and newspapers.
The problem with local media in my opinion is:
1) It’s sloppy, there are spelling mistakes, factual mistakes, research mistakes and so on, it’s basic journalism 101, please check your facts before publishing
2) It’s heavily censored, only what the government wants to come out comes out (seems to be the current government too, or whichever party that paper has an alliance to), sometimes feels a little like China
3) The content is poor, often syndicated and unoriginal, where is the real journalism, the hard talk, the cutting edge stories?
4) The specialist sections are just as bad, In-tech? Anyone even know which days it comes out? Anyone use it for anything other than eating their dinner on?
The television is just as bad, magazines are pretty poor too but seem to be getting better at least.
People just don’t care about newspapers here, stats show more than half of people that read newspapers don’t actually buy them, they just read them in the office because they are there. It’s a vicious circle, people don’t care, people don’t read, papers stay crappy, biased and with low circulations.
For example I got a URL in a national newspapers and saw a massive surge in hits of 0, yeah 0, no extra hits, no one read the paper and went online. Well if they did, it was less than 100 people, so I didn’t notice the difference.
If you did that in UK you’d get at least 100,000 hits over a week as BryanBoy saw when he was published in the UK Telegraph.
Sadly I don’t know what we can do to fix it, but well some of us are working on something to bring the new media and traditional media closer together, at least it’s a step in the right direction. It just seems to be taking forever to get started.
Bah I don’t even want to start on the quality of the television shows, argh! Comedy? You call that comedy? I call it 4 decades outdated slapstick that only appeals to people with IQs of 60 or below.
