Richard Siklos, the editor at large of Fortune Magazine, believes the newspaper will morph into two models in the future: premium products that cater to select groups and cheaply-produced free ones that serve up commodified news. He doesn't believe the $50-billion industry is dying. Far from it. But he recognizes the fast-changing industry has to respond or its decline will deepen.
Reads a lot like his piece <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081030.wsiklos1031/BNStory?cid=al_gam_nletter_maropen">here</a>!
Richard has written in Canada a lot, first for the Financial Post as its New York writer, then at times for the Globe, which also would latch on to his NYT pieces. He's Conrad Black's biographer, so it doesn't surprise me he twirled his piece into something for newspaper consumption.
I think that's what he's saying will be left: the freebies and the upmarket, niche publications, which takes away a big part of the middle.
Reply
Richard Siklos
11/02/2008 12:33
Hi--yes, Kirk, that's a fair view of my guess: not that the middle disappears, but that it's a smaller, still relevant but in some ways less ambitious thing than it used to be (e.g. pressures the ability of papers like the Sun to fund their own distant bureaus). And yes Adrian, it is a version of the same column that ran in the Globe (it currently runs there and in the Times of London also.)
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