News gets a facelift, but will anyone look?

When News Corp purchased the social networking website MySpace and a bunch of other sites for an estimated $580 million last year, Rupert Murdoch was in the middle of his digital awakening, a virtual baptism of 1s and 0s that's still underway as we speak. So today I got a little excited when me and my fellow media watchers were greeted with some news we'd all been waiting for for quite some time now: News Limited's Australian online content is to be reshaped and packaged into a new online portal. Known as News Digital Media, the new site promises to be far more accessible and readable than the current News Interactive site (news.com.au), even though a form of the current News.com.au site will appear as a section within the new portal. Australian MySpace, Careerone, Cars, and number of other News affiliates will also be dragged under the new site's banner, the address of which has yet to be released. It's everyone website you'll ever need, at least that's what Rupert wants us to think.

I, for one, have to say I'm glad that after years of talking about the new digital media paradigm News has finally seen sense and decided to overhaul its atrocious online Australian news service. In the past year, The Courier-Mail has been given facelift, as has the news.com.au front page, but every other publication's homepage remains just as unreadable and difficult to navigate as ever, offering online readers about 15% of what's in the hardcopy editions. You're not going to drive online advertising revenue with such a scarce amount of copy freely available, especially when the journalism at some of the News tabloids is as trashy as it is today.

So bravo Rupert, you're only about five years behind Fairfax. Did anyone say Podcast? A what now?

ps. And in a brief footnote, I'll leave the last word of the day to Mr Murdoch himself. This address, given to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in April last year, heralded the beginning of Rupert's digital awakening, where the idea is very much, "give the public what it wants; not what it needs". On second thoughts, i'm getting less and less excited by the prospect of a new News Limited portal by the second.

What I worry about much more is our ability to make the necessary cultural changes to meet the new demands. As I said earlier, what is required is a complete transformation of the way we think about our product. Unfortunately, however, I believe too many of us editors and reporters are out of touch with our readers. Too often, the question we ask is “Do we have the story?" rather than “Does anyone want the story?”