Adapt or perish – Rupert Murdoch says

Adapt or perish, that is the message from Rupert Murdoch to newspaper publishers around the world in his third Boyer Lecture to be broadcast today on ABC Radio National. The Herald Sun published an edited transcript yesterday. Here are a some quotes from the lecture which I found interesting:

I like the look and feel of newspapers as much as anyone. But our real business isn;t printing on dead trees. It’s giving our readers great journalism and great judgment.

In short we are moving from news papers to news brands.

The challenges are real. There will probably never be a paperless office, but young people are starting paperless homes.

The newspaper, or a very close electronic cousin, will always be around. It may not be thrown on your front doorstep the way it is today. But the thud it makes as it lands will continue to echo around society and the world.

Read the except in the paper yesterday or the full lecture which will be online after today’s broadcast.

The debate about the future of newspapers aside, Rupert Murdoch’s lecture is about change and the need to embrace this.

From a newsagent perspective, this means embracing change through every part of our business – leveraging our key assets to our advantage, taking control over parts of our business which we do not control today, developing shop fits for our needs and not the needs of builders or suppliers, pursuing new traffic generators, pursuing better margin product, refusing to engage in out of date practices and creating retail experiences which are ground breaking .

Most of all, for newsagents embracing change is about becoming entrepreneurial.