 So I'm Ross Dawson here with Goode Leonard. We're both futurists. I live in Australia and Goode lives in Switzerland and we happen to be physically in the same place. So having conversation today about the extinction or possible extinction of newspapers. So a little while ago, I released this chart showing where the years in which newspapers would become extinct or irrelevant rather and every country around the world and it got an interesting response. So Goode, what do you think? Do you think newspapers will become extinct? Yeah, I always, you know, I do a lot of work in the sector and my main point is always, are we interested in news or are we interested in paper? So I think the paper business and printing and trucking and shipping, we can do without that. You know, I mean, it's bad for the people printing and driving the trucks. They have to look for other work, right? But it's about news. It's about what actually is there, right? So if we drop the paper from newspaper, I think we'll be just fine because that's also 8% of the money spent on newspapers and magazines is not the content. It's not the making of the content. It is the distribution of it, right? So it's also better for the environment, you know, to not print as much as the allegedly is. But I think the situation really as it's right now is that I don't think print will die, but it will definitely not grow. So to me, I like print for certain occasions, but in general I think we're looking at cutting off the paper of the news part and saying let's grow the news business. You know, there is great amount there and just like the music industry, there's great amount of music, but let's not record necessarily, sell recorded music, right? We can look a different direction. There's a good business there. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I call it news on paper or other newspapers because that's what it is and distinguishes that news and paper part. And so I've been getting caught up a lot in these questions and discussions about, you know, whether newspapers will die or when they will die and to a point that's not as interesting as what is the future of news? Because less and less will be on paper. Yes, part will be on paper. I think that will become very unimportant in the broader picture, but the future of news is a far richer subject around where one of the distribution mechanisms, how what is the role of journalists paid and unpaid or contributes to that? How do we filter that news? And clearly more and more of those delivery mechanisms are digital, but what will they look like and how common, how similar will the news that I see be to the news that you see? Yeah, I mean, there's lots of issues here, but of course, there's many positive things. For example, the the fact that more and more people are writing stuff and blogging and Twittering and whatever Facebook updating whatever. I think that means that a lot more professional filtering is needed, right? So the the flood of content means I need really good journalists to help me go through that, right? So the need is there, the demand is there, the delivery is getting cheaper. All these things are good, right? That's that's a good development. Now we have to basically say, okay, how do we make a business model out of that? And to say, for example, the the biggest conflict here being paywalls and those kind of things, right? Yeah, if we're going to say now all of a sudden the consumer has to pay for news while basically they never paid for news because it was paid for by advertising in some cases by subscriptions, but by and large is a third-party pace model for online Usually physically bought the newspaper. Yeah, they bought the newspaper, but it wasn't sufficient to actually pay for what it costs, right? For example, you can get wired magazine for ten bucks a year. That's not enough to ship it and print it, right? But the reason that you bought it for ten bucks a year is because you can be sold as an eyeball, right? Yes, right. So I think that is the way we have to look forward is to say, okay, how are we going to get this kind of ad support mechanism into the news of the future so we can afford the content creation? That's a key question and that requires sort of a new ecosystem of appetizers, device makers, content makers, you know, all this thing together. So part of it is, you know, the famous long tail means that we are able to get for small more and more smaller audiences and this creates a far larger market because now we can access micro markets as well as larger markets and you don't have the costs of, you know, for example printing distributing to access those and but what it also means is that this money, the advertising money basically is spread more thinly and so we're starting to get these smaller and smaller niches. So creation of these multi niche strategies where there are some big mass markets remaining there, few of them and they are not as large, but basically when you have to scale the costs, commensurate with revenues, then that requires a dramatically different model and I think more and more of this creation of these multi niche news or media offerings which access a micro community can be very highly targeted in their advertising, have lower costs of produce and they can be cross subsidization of the costs of creating these multi niches, but each one of those viable in its own right. My view is I think that people will pay for value when they see value and the job of the magazine or newspaper publisher is to demonstrate that value so that I can touch it and then decide to pay for it. If I'm being forced to pay before I see the value, I just won't pay because in a way of course I can tap into the river of news in many different ways now but if I like for example really strong curation in the financial sector then I go the financial time for the Wall Street Journal, I'm happy to pay, but I have to see the value first. So we take a tool like Flipboard or so if there would be something like Flipboard Plus to where I can get all the extra values with the publisher, I'd be happy to pay. That alone I think can be as big as cable TV as far as the value generation is being concerned. Yeah one of the challenges there is that you know Ruben Rudolph for example with his the daily iPad app, yeah it's an interesting venture and I think but one of the real challenges there is does anybody want to go to a single source for news? I mean there is the value of you get an understood editorial stance who are selecting stories which you understand the base on which they've been selected and maybe they're interesting and you feel you've covered the scope but I think that more and more people want to be able to get these multiple perspectives so you don't just want the news that comes from the times or just the news that comes from the daily or just the news that comes from the Huffington Post and so it's harder and harder for the existing media companies to say this is the slice which is the newspaper or the news on paper or the online news site when people are looking for this aggregation. So aggregation is a bit of a dirty word in the media industry yet that is where a lot of the value resides and being able to present what is valuable to an individual. I mean as we discussed earlier I think that we're in the middle of the shift from what I call the ecosystem you know which is completely mine and you're inside of my thing right for example Disney Universal Studios of Wall Street Journal you're inside of this and the ecosystem which is a connected system right so there's a bunch of stuff happening YouTube is an ecosystem right and MTV is an ecosystem so the question is how do we get from A to B and this is a painful transition but the future is ecosystems with very few ecosystems left and if you're going to build an ecosystem I think it'll be quite difficult now it's possible but the future of news to me is to create a really powerful ecosystem that makes sense as you were saying sharing perspectives and creating some sort of serendipity as well yes this is this is the key right and that is the value to me so it's a reinvention process which I think is painful but good news as I was saying earlier people want news people generate news people are willing to pay for online content right professional users are needed and curators so that's all good we just have to invent the ecosystem pretty much from scratch now and this is quite a challenge yeah and the challenge being most of the news on paper purveyors are come from an ecosystem as you described it and it's very difficult to make that shift from that to a broader space but those are very likely the spaces that will win well thanks for tuning in you can visit Ross's site what's what's your site Ross Dawson dot com or just search for Ross Dawson okay and mine is mediafuturist.com and thanks for tuning in and listening to us delivering our diatrops thanks