Being part of the nation’s largest/only/greatest newspaper, one issue I’ve had debates over is the future of media here. My guess is, it will never die. It might not survive in the form as we know it now, but where else can we get our weekend SingTel, M1 or StarHub ads, or figure out the weekly NTUC, Cold Storage or Shop & Save promotions?
(Yeah, I’m not linking to the lame supermarket sites as the lack of details there is shocking, given that they are a retail front. Those guys should check out the weekly ads offered by mega stores like Best Buy or Target for lessons in proper marketing.)
Local newspapers, as the name suggests, are great with localised news but when it comes to international coverage…. the point is, even I head elsewhere for non-local news these days.
Take for example the latest E3 event in Los Angeles this week. This is only the biggest event for gadgets, video games and entertainment in the world. If video games were porn, E3 would be the Playboy Mansion. If gadgets were aliens, E3 would be Area 51…. you get my point.
One would expect that with the video game market booming, newspapers would be quick at reporting what is no longer to be considered mere’s child’s play.
Here are some interesting bits I found online, all announced in Los Angeles this week:
And these are just the ones on the first day. Now, I’m not saying local newspaper should dedicate the entire edition to E3, but compared to what was covered in the national daily, which I found using Google Custom Search on the main paper’s website, the results are appalling.
There was a total of eight E3 related stories, each with one picture on the four day event. Which is not too shabby, but what about events on the floor?
That’s where the power of the Internet rules I’m afraid.
With TweetDeck, I scanned for familiar E3 related topics and came up with these from fellow Twitheads.
More can be found here and here so you can probably guess what words I was searching for. And during the course of the four day event, I was on Viigo on my Blackberry, receiving RSS Feeds on various E3 topics from some of my favourite websites.
The good thing is, Viigo can be put in sync with my Google Reader, where I already have feeds from several sites directed to me. It’s like having a news concierge service for free.
Ok, I shall stop now in case this becomes a pro E3 rant, but one thing that traditional media has yet to embrace is how new technology is affecting perception of news gathering. And I’m not wondering about the 50 years old editors wondering about the future of 50 year old newspaper readers out there.
If 20 or 30 year olds aren’t reading papers now, there are bigger things to worry about.
If you’ve grown up watching videos on your phone, buying music online and receiving instant gratification of content with technology, your association with news print is that it is used to wrap vegetables in the market, if you actually do visit the market.
Let’s take a look at a traditional news source and a new one, and how each has embraced technology.
Local tabloid outlet, Today has blogs, and applications for iPhone and what not. Yippee.
Let’s check out the user generated resource, Twitter. Aside from the above mentioned TweetDeck, I have TwitterBerry on my Blackberry, alongside my Facebook, MSN Messenger and Google Talk.
My Twitter applications allows me to aggregate sources, across multiple devices, from phone to laptop, wherever I may roam . And if anyone asks me where I get my news from, I would look like a fool telling them to use one resource won’t it?
Just as well because in the future, media will have many facets.
SL
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