Peter van Dongen's BLog

After having so many readers in the past week, due to links from Quote, Boekblad and VillaMedia (thank you Jan Dijkgraaf), I remembered a speech from Jacques de Leeuw, founder of Audax. It was approximately 11 years ago. It was a New Year speech or a speech at the Tilburg University, do not remember exactly. At that time he already spoke about the changing world in the publishing industry.

He said that everyone was more or less a publisher these days (1998). The word BLog was not invented yet, but more and more people were placing articles on the Internet. It is interesting to see that on one hand he was so right and maybe was far ahead of his time, but on the other hand no one expected it too take so long. At the end of the 20th century most of the people in publishing believed that newspapers did not have any right to exist. Within 10 years they would have been disappeared and moved to the Internet. And this is not the case as we know now. (more…)

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Of course we all know that if one controls the media he can control the history. It was George Orwell with his book 1984 that taught us that you can control the past if you would be able to replace all the information that you did not like by the information that suits you right. He could not foresee the influence of the mass media in later years.

When a CFO and a CEO leave a media company at the same time, it is no rocket science that all the media want to know what is going on. Of course the fact that both left the company is true and also that they did that short after each other. But that does not mean that is has anything to do with the company, its Supervisory Board or Shareholders.
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My last blog post did not mention the newspapers. How could I forget? Maybe these were the first to discover the speed of Internet. Almost all the newspaper publishers have their own web site, where they provide – for free – every reader with the latest news. Although we – as readers – are interested in the content, we do miss the look and feel of the newspaper itself.

So why are we willing to pay for a newspaper – in paper or in digital form – and not reading our latest news on the Internet? What is the reason, that newspapers are still there? Because the WiFi in the underground is still not perfect? Or the cost for Internet in the train is more expensive than the two newspapers you bought at the kiosk (not to mention the newspapers you receive for free every morning). These reasons are more or less only temporarily. And that’s why the newspaper publishers are more and more shifting towards electronic issues. (more…)

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