Here’s a piece I wrote for The Media Online:

There is a senseless debate going on over whether or not newspapers are dead, writes Ray Hartley.
Those who believe newspapers are dead point to the US experience where online advertising revenues – along with audiences – have surpassed those of newspapers, which are held to be incapable of meeting the demands of a new generation of consumers.
Then there are those – and their ranks are rapidly diminishing – who believe that newspapers will remain the only truly trusted news source because the experience of reading something real will always trump surfing the net.
But appearances can be deceiving. For one thing, a lot of the online gains have been made by newspaper companies that have developed very successful online offerings, such as the New York Times in the US and The Times in London. What they have managed to do is to hang on to – and perhaps even build on – the audience that is reading their news across their platforms.
Far more useful than debating whether or newspapers are here to stay is the fascinating question: How is human intelligence changing and how will this change the way people consume news into the future? Those who answer this question will build products that have a future. Those who ignore it will find themselves increasingly behind the times, so to speak.
Chief scientist at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), John Seely Brown, has put a lot of thought into how new media is altering intelligence. He put it like this: “The typewriter prized one particular kind of intelligence, but with the web, we suddenly have a medium that honours multiple forms of intelligence – abstract, textual, visual, musical, social and kinaesthetic.”
He adds: “People my age tend to think that kids who are multiprocessing can’t be concentrating. That may not be true. Indeed, one of the things we noticed is that the attention span of the teens at PARC – often between 30 seconds and five minutes – parallels that of top managers, who operate in a world of fast context-switching. So the short attention spans of today’s kids may turn out to be far from dysfunctional for future work worlds.”
The (frequently infuriating) “fast-context switching” of the next generation has coincided with the rise of the internet as a news source. Search engines, cell phones, RSS feeds and the like are a much more efficient way to find information than waiting for a newspaper to drop on your doorstep the next morning.
That’s because information is no longer in short supply. It is possible to find out almost anything about anything within seconds with a few clicks of the mouse.
Richard A Lanham wrote a very thought provoking book called The Economics of Attention. In it he made the point that economics is about the allocation of scarce resources. The point he made was that it is attention, and not information, which is the scarce resource.
In short: Why will your newspaper be the destination for those who want news and information which is abundantly available elsewhere?
The answer lies in how newspapers meet the challenges of this next generation of consumers. A question I often ask of managers is: “Are you adding to the information glut or are you helping the reader navigate their way through it?”
Newspapers that offer a clear and simple way through this information-flooded world have a future.
Brown says: “The new literacy, beyond text and image, is one of information navigation. The real literacy of tomorrow entails the ability to be your own personal reference librarian – to know how to navigate through confusing, complex information spaces and feel comfortable doing so. ‘Navigation’ may well be the main form of literacy for the 21st century.”
Newspapers that follow three simple rules will survive, even flourish, into the future.
The first is that they must speak to the growing visual intelligence of their readers by giving pictures the same status as words in presentation. This is not an easy battle to win in an industry where words have always dominated. Words that do not attract and retain the attention of readers through presentation will be ignored.
The second rule is that newspapers must offer interactivity. They must do so within their pages, but this will always be limited by space. The internet has no such limitation. A close relationship with a news website opens the way for much greater participation by a newspaper’s readers.
The third is that newspapers must chart a course through the sea of information. If they add to the clutter, they will have no place in a world where attention is in short supply.

Related posts:

1. What newspapers must do
2. Internet overtakes newspapers and radio as a news source in the US
3. The Times is two today!
4. The Times has silenced the doubters
5. The Times – One year old and stronger than ever