Grandmaster Flash, Rupert Murdoch, and the future of newspapers

This post has been corrected from a previous version.

Last week, Rupert Murdoch bet that newspapers would be around for another 20 years. Too bad he didn't say how they'd reverse their steep declines. If he had spoken with Jeremy Allaire, he might have offered some solutions.

Allaire, of course, was a big evangelist of Flash (the real Grandmaster Flash), former CTO of Macromedia, and is now running Brightcove, an Internet TV platform used by much of big media to deliver content and advertising. I spoke with Allaire before Murdoch's talk, and he said that newspaper companies need to get "comfortable with the inherent cannibalism" between old-fashioned print and content delivered via multimedia "to get access to the high-volume, big-spend advertisers for their content."

A few years ago, Allaire predicted the rise of 'uber-platforms" for delivering Web content whether it be news, entertainment, or advertising. He thought the platforms would be AOL, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, and that they'd be in place by early 2007.

That hasn't happened yet so the newspaper companies still have a chance to gain not just toehold as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post have today, but real footholds, what Allaire calls "next-gen platforms."

As next-generation platforms, Allaire envisions newspaper publishers seeking additional revenues by increasing the volume of content that can carry ads, increasing the number of ads sold, and increasing the prices charged for the ads.

The first challenge is straightforward - an editor's delight. Too often stories are presented holistically as text, or as video, or as some fancy module with moving parts. There's no reason that a window with a video, a box of text, or a pop-up map can't layered on top of news story if the media carrying it is digital.

Allaire says it's taken advertisers the past two two-three years to understand overlay technologies and now it's up to the content producers to get it. "There's a lost opportunity to go deeper with stories by including adjacent content that explores story tangents and people's relationships."

Once that happens, newspaper's digital audiences should grow and with them, the number of higher-priced ads sold. More publishers might then experiment with outsourcing sales for parts of their inventory to the likes of Google or Yahoo, and perhaps experiment with networked sales forces.

But can such increases in revenue offset the current rate of decline? Well, if it takes 20 years, then Murdoch will be proven wrong. Very wrong.

-- Blaise Zerega

THIS POST HAS BEEN CORRECTED: In the second paragraph, I had incorrectly referred to Allaire as the inventor of Flash. For more on Flash, see Wikipedia.