By Norbert Specker/December 2003 - The field of predictions is littered with lost reputations, plain ridicule, and piles of ashes from money that was burned along the way. This is not a particular characteristic of our times, rather a very typical trait of “la condition humaine.”

However, in a period of exploding network growth, such as the one we have the privilege to live in, those predictions find an environment that is constantly shifting, unstable. If it was always tricky to predict developments before, predictions these days are little more than bets on horses.

My favourite adage in the field of economical and technological predictions is that we always tend to over-estimate the speed and depth of change in the short run (mainly because we neglect to take all the necessary nitty-gritty elements into account). But we almost always under-estimate the speed of change over a longer period of five or 10 years because we assume a linear development (that things will happen in the next 10 years as fast as they happened the last 10 years). In actuality, we are, and have been for at least a century, subject to a constantly increasing speed of development.

Newspapers and the effect the Internet had on them are great examples for this from a business as well as a marketing perspective. When the Internet started to appear on the radar of some employees of the industry, it seemed to offer everything a publisher could ever long for. Cheap distribution, great direct contact with the readers, excellent advertising options. For the proponents of those first years, it only seemed a matter of a few short years before newspapers would conduct the majority of the business through the Internet. So strong was their conviction that they were able to rock the confidence of almost every publisher. To be replaced by electronic media was suddenly not such a distant scenario anymore.

However, it is 2004. In many markets newspapers are just entering a new record year. In other markets changes in distribution, editorial concept, and formats have brought about a stop to a downward trend, almost a revival. So — obviously — we just over-estimated the speed of change.

Or did we?

Advertiser files are sped through the Internet. Journalists save countless hours finding experts on the Internet instead of through the telephone book. And there are countless marketing functions now handled through the Internet.

Much more disruptive, however, is how the Internet has influenced and formed your reader and your employees. Clay Shirky, adjunct professor in New York University’s graduate interactive telecommunications programme, says that mass media is depending on two key characteristics of the audience: mass and silence.

Mass: Whenever media developments are discussed these days, we talk about segregation, a growing number of products for a growing number of niche audiences. The Times in London’s offering of two different newspaper formats can be viewed as a consequence of the individual media consumption through the Internet, as can a TV magazine for girls just launched in Germany.

Silence: The feedback circles have become instantaneous, putting a lot of pressure on companies that do not know how to use the drive of those loud, interconnected, and informed consumers in a way that helps them to become a permanently learning organisation.

Many successful newspapers in their paper version these days reflect the closer and more intimate ties to the readers. To have journalists produce their private weblogs, offer additional information on a web site, and stay permanently in touch with their readership has rightly become the hallmark of innovative newspapers . Markets have become conversations.

So maybe the Internet has not met your and my short-term expectations. But it has changed our markets and our business beyond recognition and to a degree that none of the Internet preachers of 1994 could have possibly foreseen.



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Norbert Specker is the founder of Interactive Publishing GmbH, a service and intervention company dedicated to support the newspaper publishing industry.