Scan-N-Land

An optimist about newspapers

I sent away for a copy of the Charlie Rose interview with Anthony O'Reilly that I mentioned in my earlier post. Here is the relevant passage. Rose is asking O'Reilly, a former CEO of the Heinz company and now a prominent global financier, why he's willing to invest in deadtree publications at a time when the Internet is all the rage:


ANTHONY O'REILLY: My view is that with the
Internet and the proliferation and the ubiquity of the Internet,
newspapers, if they had not been invented, would have had to be invented
because of the Internet.
Because in my view, a newspaper, properly edited and presented
newspaper, is the ultimate browser. In a half an hour, you can get all the
news, all the views, all the sport, all the gossip, all the commentary from
people you trust or dislike or like, and you get it all for the price of a
cup of coffee.
CHARLIE ROSE: And you do your own search.
SIR ANTHONY O`REILLY: Absolutely. Whereas, if you go on the
Internet, you have look for something. You`re looking for something.
CHARLIE ROSE: But why are American newspapers hurting?
SIR ANTHONY O`REILLY: Well, I think that certain events happened in
American newspapers over the past two or three years. There were some
scandals involved in relation to the ABC circulation.
CHARLIE ROSE: Right.
SIR ANTHONY O`REILLY: Most newspapers wanted to clean up the act and
to say this actually is a circulation that we have. And so many of the
fees that they gave away and many of the contortions that they used to
increase their circulation have been done away with.
CHARLIE ROSE: Right.
SIR ANTHONY O`REILLY: And so papers are now coming back to the
bedrock of their actual circulation.
But I would think that the actual circulation decline of the
newspapers has been relatively nominal, and worldwide, newspapers are
actually on the increase. In India, for example, we are showing a 25
percent increase in our newspaper...
CHARLIE ROSE: But I point out something you know. They`re developing
at a rapid rate an increased middle class in India.
SIR ANTHONY O`REILLY: That`s correct. And those people believe that
newspapers, to them, are, as I said, the ultimate browser.

posted by Kathy Kiely @ 5/14/2007 03:20:00 PM