The End (of the Legacy Media) is Near

The End of the World is suddenly cool, what with the movie 2012 debuting soon and cable TV airing a program a day about the Mayan calendar or Nostradamus. I’ve made my own prediction about the End of Times, or rather the end of The Times (metaphorically speaking). Events of this past week make it clear the end is getting closer.

All you have to do is look at the illustration of Rupert Murdoch in the latest edition of Vanity Fair. He’s holding a laptop, sideways as if reading a newspaper. Murdoch - never especially Internet savvy - wants to charge for online news content after proclaiming at Beijing’s World Media Summit there is a trend toward charging for content. Never mind that most analysts, academics and other prognosticators say it’s too late to charge readers for general news content.

Murdoch had at least one ally in China - Associated Press CEO Tom Curley who complained that search engines and bloggers are siphoning off revenue from content creators like the AP and Murdoch’s News Corp. Both were quoted as saying it was time for content creators to take back “control.”

By control, of course, Murdoch and Curley mean revenue.

Murdoch’s a master at the legacy media, but his inability to manage technology ventures is legendary. Take a look at what's happened to MySpace since NewsCorp paid $580 million for the once high-flier in 2005. MySpace has lost more than five million monthly visitors, four million last month alone, not to mention the more than $350 million in red ink spilled this year by the once profitable MySpace.

Likewise, the AP has other avenues for making money without attacking the very people who have keep general news content alive while printed pubs decline. Hint: it’s online readers who drive Web traffic to AP member publications by sharing news content on personal blogs, Web sites and social network sites.

And if you needed any more evidence that printed newspapers are doing everything they can to make themselves irrelevant, the Atlanta Journal Constitution announced with great fanfare they will no longer endorse political candidates. Local content is supposed to be the savior of daily print publications, but clearly Cox Newspapers has other ideas.

Change is coming. Even Mr. Murdoch predicted it in 2005 when he said “Technology is shifting power away from the editors, the publishers, the establishment, the media elite. Now it’s the people who are taking control.”

The only question is when.