A story I recently wrote for the September issue of Intelligence Magazine

Delivering the Annual Livery Lecture at The Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers earlier this year after recently celebrating his 75th birthday, global media tycoon Rupert Murdoch told the old vanguard of publishers and media owners that he was planning a radical re-alignment of his own media empire and that it would be focused around the Internet as it’s core means of distribution. Not erring there, Murdoch conceded that most of the established media heavyweights had completely missed the mark with regards to harnessing the true power of the information age and that this was a fatal error when one compares how well other companies such as Google and Yahoo have done in establishing themselves as successful Web-based media mammoths.

For an industry that has historically been slow and often reluctant to change, this was like witnessing Henry Ford telling everyone at a motor-show that the combustion engine required a major overhaul in order for car sales to continue.

Participation Era
But what has driven this complete ideological shift and the re-working of business models that have outlasted even the Cold War? For many of us it might already be blatantly obvious and we’ll testify to having seen this coming for a long time. One by one we’re beginning to cancel our newspaper subscriptions in favour of online-based content which is generally free, extensive, searchable, environmentally-friendly and delivered to our inboxes via ‘push’ technologies such as RSS.

There is also the emergence of broadband technology and the myriad Web 2.0 social networking and media services which have already become cult-hits in our lives and have enabled us to participate in the news and voice our opinions in the knowledge society. This, as we’ve discovered, is so much more gratifying than one-dimensional, static content which is served up in most newspapers. Services such as Flickr, Blogger, YouTube, Del.icio.us and Digg have all revolutionised the way we communicate online and also the way we consume our news.

Two Plus Two
It was with this new found respect for the Net that Murdoch alluded to in his speech earlier this year that caused him to go on a massive $1bn spending spree, acquiring a host of online properties to add to the existing News Corporation umbrella of companies like 20th Century Fox and Sky TV. And the new jewel in the crown? A popular team-centric social networking site called MySpace which was finally purchased for $580 million after outbidding rivals Viacom.

The premise for MySpace and the new-wave of social networking portals sprouting up from garages and outhouses across the globe is that they connect people to each other rather than to information, and in this way news is organically shared and produced in ‘clusters’. Kind of in the same way weeds spread from opposite sides of a flower-bed and engulf your newly planted flowers. Added to this are tools which allow users’ to blog, instant-message, upload photos, music and video clips and post links to their favourite artists and movies.

A Recipe for Success
All-in-all MySpace has over 20 million registered users, with that number growing by more than 100 000 a day, and it continues to clock billions of page impressions a month, making it a top-ten site in the US. For Murdoch, there has never been a better way to ‘reach’ the teen market with virtually no marketing or content costs. It also serves as a lucrative outlet for advertisers to reach the tricky teen-market en masse and what’s more gives News Corporation a perfect convergence platform for inconspicuously marketing and showcasing content from its numerous subsidiary companies.

As the rest of the media industry waits for the verdict on whether Murdoch’s social experiment is heralded as a sustainable success or not, nervous publishers and newspaper owners rack their brains trying to figure out how to diversify their revenue streams and ensure that generations of healthy newspaper-readers’ continue to live on.

What does this mean for the everyday Joe on the street? For once the future of news publishing looks likely to be determined by how people choose to customise the news they consume and what’s more, are given more choice than ever before. As Rupert Murdoch so euphemistically puts it, “Content is being repurposed to suit the needs of a contemporary audience”.