Once more unto the breach
The Internet has been a complete disaster for traditional media.
In the olden days, if you wanted news and/or entertainment you read it in newspapers and magazines, listened to it on the radio or watched it on TV. You were provided with all this content either for free or for a heavily subsidised fee, by media that drew most of its revenue from advertisers willing to pay to get their message in front of you.
Then the Internet came along, and with it web journalism and content. This new distribution mechanism soon started taking audience away from the incumbent as, not only was is predominantly free, but more immediate, diverse and interactive than anything they could offer.
Ever since, old media has been trying to work out how it can coexist with, and embrace, new media. But with so many new sources of content, and thus audience, comes a dilution of advertising funds. Right now it's quite a tricky proposition to make money out of producing content so, necessity being the mother of invention, media companies are exploring alternatives to the default, ad-funded, model.
The biggest innovator is probably the company with the most at stake - Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. It has already set up pay-walls for the websites of newspapers such as the WSJ, the Times and the News of the World, and yesterday it finally launched a completely new, new media venture, into which it has invested millions of dollars.
It's called The Daily, and it's a tablet newspaper currently restricted to the iPad and the US. "New times demand new journalism," said Murdoch. "So we built The Daily completely from scratch - on the most innovative device to come about in my time - the iPad."
Now Murdoch's going to be 80 this year, and there have been a fair few innovations in his time, so it looks like he's been forgetting to wear his tin-foil hat when talking to Steve Jobs. But the use of such hyperbole indicates how important Murdoch thinks the tablet is as a distribution platform for content.