Online – a necessary evil - 30 Nov 2009

Whether Rupert Murdoch's threat to pull content from News Corp off Google and put up a pay wall on all content from the company's publications is idle or not, it has brought to the fore, yet again, the question of whether newsprint will survive the rise of the digital age.

There's a definite growing fear that print publications will slowly phase out as decreasing revenues make them unsustainable. It's a huge conundrum that companies are facing and whatever has to be done needs to be done soon. In this day and age, you really don't exist if you don't have a presence online - it is a necessary evil. The trick is how companies turn that evil - that churns out free content - into a money-making entity.

Most consumers no longer share any loyalty to certain publications as Google throws up various websites every time you search for a story. In Africa, a large portion of the population will barely recognise newspapers as a prime source of news as many leapfrog the print era and go straight to digital. There's a new era dawning for news content on the web - Rupert Murdoch knows it, and so do a host of other media companies including Naspers, which announced last week that it will continue to focus on growing its internet operations, which I think, is a wise decision at this point in time.