The
Online Future for the Commonwealth Press
Paper
presented to Commonwealth Editors Forum, Rainbow Conference, Cape Town
by
Guy Berger, Oct 1996
Editors
have too little vision, and too much operational control. That's the conclusion
of a major report to the World Association of Newspapers (Fiej) by McKinsey
and Company (1996). It is probably a conclusion with which many editors will
readily concur. But if ever there was a time to pause from the daily grind and
lift one's nose off the stone in order to focus on the future, that time is
now. Precisely because history is stepping up its pace so rapidly, we need to
back off and take stock of what's happening. I hope in this paper to do exactly
this, and to try and make sense of where newspapers are headed in a time when
two closely related developments are impacting everywhere: globalisation on
the one hand, and new online media on the other.