From digital immigrants to digital natives

DUE to the fast changing of the technology that saw many people, particularly youngsters, moving from a culture of waiting to read news papers in the morning to depend much on internet to get news as faster as possible, Rupert Murdoch is telling editors, to know the threat is posing by the wind of change and cope with it.

He tells them also to change mindset from deciding what the reader should read, to what they want to read particularly that affects they daily activities.

Murdoch, a news paper business tycoon, believes that the advent of the new technology, the internet, if taken as a new competitor, can better print media if trained people in news room can decide to cope with the fast moving train as he believes that a blog coined by a street girl, for example, cannot be like that created by a news expert.

He likened the new situation with what appeared in 1990 when the rise of television also posed a threat to newspapers but knowing that threat, people in the industry changed also their mindsets, and re-packaged their news items to suit the new demand and then they excelled well.

“Thinking back to the challenge that television posed to the newspaper business, we can see some similarities. A new technology comes along, and like many new things, it somewhat exciting at first, simply by virtue of being new…” he says.