I believe that it’s only a matter of time that some entrepreneur will use the Wordpress MU platform further drive newspapers into the grave.
Wordpress just keeps getting better and better.
Now they are offering HD video streaming capabilities for your wordpress blog or site via VideoPress.
They also have VideoPress available as an open source framework for large WordPress MU installs (check it out here). This will allow entrepreneurial publishers an own end to end HD video solution. There have been other solutions available for Wordpress for a while, but I am excited to see a powerful video solution coming from the creators of Wordpress.
The Revenue that can be created as a publishing platform with VideoPress and Wordpress MU is huge for those big thinking entrepreneurs. Wordpress is such a powerful platform with NO COSTS.
Now for a prediction…
With all the goodness coming from Wordpress and the newspaper industry in the toilette, I believe that it’s only a matter of time that some young savvy entrepreneur will use the WPMU platform to create “Newspaper 2.0″ (a type of community news company for a digital generation) with the potential of rivaling a Ginette or McClatchy. Ultimately driving newspapers further into the grave.
Why do I believe Wordpress will start replacing the traditional newspaper companies?
- Scalability – you can deploy infinite sites from one install (i.e. – sf.new-site.com, ny.news-site.com, etc.).
- Cost – Their are no costs for the technology, except for hosting or you hire designers/devs to do major customization (with all the amazing premium themes these days major customization can be greatly reduced).
- Automation – you can automate the author process and hire contributors from any city or country in the world.
- Features – It up to date with tech trends of our digital generation and almost any kind of plugin can be found for sms, twitter, digg, video, social this and that and so on…
- Time to market – with such a huge open source community of contributors you can deploy sites with all the features you could want within hours to days.
- Overall mindset – Those who would work with wordpress and develop savvy ideas with the technology tend to be young connected individuals vs. current conglomerate news companies who tend to be old school thinkers who struggle to understand todays pace of trends.
- I could continue with more examples, but thats all the time for today.
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Thanks for stopping by! ~ Devin Day
2 Responses
But, the primarily issue you’re going to run into is credibility.
Do one-off bloggers have the credibility to be trusted? Is there any accountability? That’s what newspaper are built around is that credibility and trust to report on the truth.
Sure, anyone can write a blog, but who’s to say they’re trust worthy?
Additionally, it’s a scalability issue of how much is being reported on. A single blogger can only report on so much news, it’s just the matter of human bandwidth. Newspapers have dozens upon dozens of reporters, while sure, blog networks *could* have that, but it’s not scalable.
Hi Jonathan,
You have excellent points on the issues of bloggers and on trust factor. In response I would say:
1) Wordpress is just the platform technology I am highlighting – thus the contributor does not need to be your average “blogger,” but can be any respected author or contributor.
2) In terms of trust I think that there are plenty of questions surrounding whether the public trusts news coming from traditional news companies. Do folks at newspaper companies or even CNBC or ABC or Fox have any biases? I think we know the answer to that question, so in my opinion I think trust could easily be built into a system like this. But again my main point is that technology of wordpress could easily be deployed in a way and business model that could easily rival printed newspapers, thus helping the overall demise of the newspaper industry.
(the labor, printing and distribution model alone is so costly for the newspaper industry vs. the digital distribution and syndication power of wordpress which can be done so cheaply)