Over on the BBC Reporters website, business editor Robert Peston has reprinted his speech from the Edinburgh TV Festival, which ended last night.
The key take out for me? Journalists are now in competition with each other, whatever the medium, as consumers are open to getting their news from a variety of sources (online journalism blogger / academic Alfred Hermida neatly calls this the rise of the 'total journalist').
According to Robert Peston: "It's increasingly clear that much of the audience doesn't care whether they receive their information via the blog, some other Internet channel, the TV, newspapers or radio...
...digital is our primary distribution network...we are all in the same market....technology, working practices and consumer behaviour are all manifestations of the creation of a seamless digital news marketplace."
Peston also talked about a survey where the BBC asked where people got their news about the economy from. 84% said TV, 53% said the Internet and 52% said a newspaper.
That result - which puts digital and newspapers more or less neck and neck (which is still noteworthy) - strikes me as more believable than ones I've quoted in the past, for example from TNS, which put newspapers a distant third.
Among younger ABC1 consumers, the Internet was a news source for 61%, but TV was still in front at 74% - this corresponds to the recent Ofcom report here in the UK that shows that even among younger consumers, TV is what they would give up last.
However Peston's main point chimes in with what PwC talked about the other month. It's no longer useful to think in terms of print, online, TV etc, rather now we have to think of 'media brands' with digital being increasingly the prime mechanism of delivery.
Case in point, Robert Peston in theory writes for a TV channel, yet I read his report on BBC Online, the format and content of which is not that different from what I'd read on, say the online version of Rupert Murdoch's The Times.
Which is one very good reason why I think that Murdoch's plans for charging for content will ultimately fall flat - pay walls for online newspapers could be huge opportunities for the online versions of TV news.
- James Murdoch's Vision For The Future Of TV (news.sky.com)
- BBC's Robert Peston on the 'total' journalist (reportr.net)
- BBC's websites 'flooding the market' says News Corp's James Murdoch (telegraph.co.uk)
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