Rji-interview-galligan-picht

Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2012 04:04:43 +0000
From: "Picht, Randy" <pichtr@rjionline.org>,br> Subject: Galligan-Picht convo

RANDY DESCRIBES THE CONVERSATION:

• Galligan says his working premise is for news to survive it has to adapt to its environment and it's not

really doing a good job right now. The article, which has worked well for 400 years as the key building block for the industry, no longer makes sense in a world where mobile news consumption is ubiquitous.

• We need to question the norm, have no constraints and try to learn from other industries that have had to

adapt to changing environments.

• The video game industry is a good example. When big-screen games, like Halo and Zelda, were the primary

players it would be silly to imagine that a game like Angry Birds would get any interest from anyone. That's because folks were setting aside a block of time to play a game, just like they might do to watch a movie or television. Angry Birds isn't very entertaining.

• But on the smartphone, where games are played in five-minute burst while waiting in line or at the airport

waiting to board, etc., it's the perfect video game. If Zelda and Halo were available on the smartphone (maybe they are) they would hardly get any interest at all.

This will be a great opportunity to create a conversation and get a better understanding of what some of the issues are and what can be done. The news industry is changing so quickly that having that information can be elusive. What was current three months ago may now be obsolete.

So, we need to discuss how we deal with that for this event and into the future.