Anton Savage: Does Tortoise Media’s Observer bid point to a new future for newspapers?
Many print outlets are struggling to find a business model that can sustain them in the digital age, but there are some success stories
Originally published in the Business Post.
The news that the Guardian is entering negotiations to sell the Observer newspaper to Tortoise Media - a vehicle set up by former Sunday Times Editor and BBC news director James Harding - gives the lie to the assumption that newspapers are all in hospice care.
For years we have been told the internet will end newspapers, just like we were told TV would end radio and VHS would end cinema. Each new technology has been predicted to crush its less advanced predecessor, but pretty much none ever do.
They jostle for position, they push and shove and inflict damage, but usually a form of benign co-habitation results. Take TV. The received wisdom was that the new medium would erase radio. Quite the opposite - more people in Ireland listen now than at any point in our history.
What TV did do was radically change how we consumed radio. The family gathering around the wireless in the evening to listen to light entertainment and comedy programming ceased completely as Baird’s box usurped that role. Radio (thanks to transistorisation shrinking the vacuum-tube cabinet) shifted to personal individual consumption and commuter listening, where it thrives nearly a century later.
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