Blame internet and outdated business models for the coverage of Kanerva’s SMS mess

29/03/2008

Newspaper trashFinnish citizens have had to cope with a tremendeous amount of low quality journalism this past week. Our foreign minister, Mr. Ilkka Kanerva, had sent some text messages to a female dancer who then ran off to the yellow press to release them to public scrutiny. Even the (normally) highly respected Helsingin Sanomat fell in and wrote numerous articles on this matter (then again they are the unofficial horn of the Social Democratic Party – Kanerva is from the National Coalition Party).

The down side of all this is, in my opinion, that this kind of journalism is here to stay. Why? Because of the internet and the media companies’ inability to renew their old, unsustainable business models. Iltalehti and Ilta-Sanomat are usually competing head to head for the highest ranking website in terms of online visitors and visits on the weekly TNS Metrix ranking.

They are constantly losing ground in the offline world as people are reading news online. Once online, you have to be quick and react immediately to the latest events to be the site that people pass around through e-mail and IM. If you’re slow you’re gone. Well, no you’re not – if you decide to compete on something more sustainable where people actually spend time and enjoy the content. Have you had a look at the Finnish yellow press websites? Their front pages are long as hell – that’s because you need as much coverage on as many items to grasp the interest of a wide, very fragmented audience.

The problem of losing advertising money is not something only the Finnish press is battling with. US saw the biggest plunge in advertising revenue in 50 years. Media companies’ business models are heavily outdated and if they cannot renew their way of thinking and creating value for the customer – we will see many more scandals covered in the hope of a few more eyes grabbed for attention.

Photo by diver227, licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.

There is 1 comment in this article:

  1. 31/03/2008Mara say:

    The same stuff has happened already long ago with television, in the Netherlands it’s worse than in Finland; there is no way you can really watch anything these days without being (visually) spammed with gossip and sex. Everything is just so short span nowadays, which is sort of fatuiging since we have to rush from topic to topic and there aren’t many situations where we can just let stuff sink in. This is why I don’t even own a television anymore. I truly hope that you aren’t right when you say you think this kind of journalism is here to stay when it comes to newspapers too, but I think you are.