2009-02-14
The Economist on Readers and News
text 12:18:00
Editorial: An iTunes Moment for Readers?
Book publishers are in better shape than record labels. Far from harming sales, the Kindle and the iPhone seem to offer incremental revenue, by making it easier for avid readers to buy more titles.
Consumers treat phones (and Kindles) differently from PCs. People pay for text messages, even though e-mail is free. Apple has sold millions of iPhone applications through the iTunes store. Several newspapers and magazines are already available, by subscription, to Kindle users. As with iTunes, people are happy to pay once it is made easy.
Steve Jobs, Apple’s mercurial boss, has expressed scepticism about e-readers, claiming that “people don’t read any more”. But Mr Jobs has a record of insisting that Apple is not interested in making a particular product (a video iPod, a mobile phone)—right up until the moment when he unveils one. Might e-books soon be the next example?
(See also: The march of the Kindle)
Article: Why news agencies are thriving
Associated Press (AP) and Reuters, date back to the expansion of the telegraph in the mid-19th century, when rapid newsgathering first became possible.
The financial crisis is taking a terrible toll on both financial-services firms and newspapers, so you might expect the news agencies that serve them to be in trouble too. Not so. Christoph Pleitgen, a senior Reuters executive, says the big newswires have been staffing up in the past year.
Bloomberg’s recent announcement of around 190 job cuts at a foreign-language television venture got more attention than its promise to create 1,000 jobs elsewhere, including in its news bureaus. And CNN, a television-news network, plans to set up a new international agency
The risk that newspapers will be disintermediated is noted in a new report by, of all people, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University. In some ways, it is already happening. Reuters and Bloomberg offer their top stories direct to consumers on advertising-financed websites.
