Challenges Within the Newspaper Industry

Mikko Hämäläinen posted a great article – The Faulty Logic of Hanging on the Past – about challenges within newspaper industry. He also touches blogging, citizen journalism and evolution of media business in general. Below is his [shortened] list of key issues. I recommend to read the whole post.

• Organizational inflexibility leading to suboptimal performance and inflated cost base.
• Cultural inflexibility and resistance to change.
• Losing touch with the online generation, and with that the cultural phenomenon.
• How do you compete with free (ad-supported or not) while being profitable?
• How do you cope with the fact that cheap mass distribution of information is available to anyone?

Think Before Search – Save Energy

My colleague’s email signature says “Think before print, save a tree“. We may have to make a new one: “Think before search, and stop global warming”. Harvard University Physicist Alex Wissner-Gross estimates that one Google search creates 7g of CO2 emissions. Boiling one cup of tea creates 15g. He was interviewd by Times Online.

With more than 200m internet searches estimated globally daily, the electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emissions caused by computers and the internet is provoking concern.

Times Online also refers to Gartner’s estimates that ICT industry accounts for 2 percent of global CO2 emissions. It is about the same level as the whole airline industry. Wissner-Gross explains that “Google is very efficient but their primary concern is to make searches fast and that means they have a lot of extra capacity that burns energy”.