Australian Newsagency Blog

Report in Red Herring about News Corp’s global plans to leverage wireless opportunities for distribution of content. Here’s how the article starts:

Rupert Murdoch’s media empire News Corp. hopes to dominate entertainment content on cell phones by marketing aggressively in 2006 across the company’s global media network, a company executive said on Monday.

It’s part of the company’s plan to hold onto the media landscape as the advertising dollars move away from television and more toward new media like cell phones, the Internet, and video games.

Newspapers should be on that list as well. This move to more deeply engage with wireless as a channel for content is crucial and not unexpected. The News Corp. move will lead others to the well and speed up the disruption being experienced by mainstream media and their supply chain.

Lucy Hood from Fox Mobile Entertainment is quoted as saying: “In 2006 we will distribute globally and market aggressively. We will no longer rely on others to promote”

While newsagents need to discuss newspaper distribution and operational issues with publishers, the more important discussion needs to be about the future of the infrastructure we have established and how this can have a commercial viability with home delivery and retail of newspapers flat or falling.

Stories like this in Red Herring ought to drive newsagents to be working on business plans of their own. The world does not end with the News Corp wireless strategies. It changes is all and the sooner we in the newsagent channel realise that the more focused and productive our discussions with News Corp. and others will be.