Inquirer gobbles its future
January 14, 2009
UP until recently, Inquirer.net editor-in-chief JV Rufino believed that his 24-7 Web site operation was the future, and that the Inquirer.net would save the “old technology” Inquirer newspaper from extinction.
JV Rufino
The average reader of the Inquirer was in their mid 50s—“not a good place to be for the future,” the nephew of Inquirer chairman Marixi Prieto Rufino was quoted in “Asia’s Media Innovators,” a 2008 book on the regional industry financed by the German foundation Konrad Adenauer Stiftung.
“Assuming people’s eyes still work in 20 years that means only 20 more years for this paper,” JV Rufino continued. “My site’s audiences are aged 20 to 40. These are the peak working years with lots of spending power.”
Alas, the young technology-savvy editor may have spoken too soon.
As things are shaping up within the Prieto-Rufino media empire, not only would the dinosaur Inquirer save the money-losing Web operations, the Inquirer.net as a corporate entity would be collapsed and be folded into the Philippine Daily Inquirer, which, despite the similar names, has a different shareholding structure altogether.
As to JV Rufino himself, the young technology-savvy editor could find himself reporting to ink-stained journalists.
According to the Inquirer.net chatter, the Web editor not only resigned after a tiff with Inquirer.net president, Paolo Prieto, son of the Inquirer chairman and JV’s first cousin, JV Rufino has even gone to see his Inquirer print counterpart to seek rapprochement, especially after the numerous cutting remarks the forward-looking editor had said in the book and in other fora about the old folks at the print side.
Example of the JV Rufino gems: “It was good for me to be separate [apparently referring to the separate newsrooms and offices] because it allows my people the creative space to innovate.
“We like to keep them separate for the moment because they’ve got a lot of old habits in the Inquirer that we’d like to move away from online, so I don’t like my reporters getting infected at the Inquirer.”
“[The old reporters] are freaking out that the new and improved version [of reporter] is going to take over their livelihood.”
Still, more than the brash statements and the bruised egos, what is worrying now the tame Inquirer union is how the long-discussed “editorial convergence” would impact on the reportorial work load and, more important, their annual profit-share.
But, that, as they say in the old media, is another story.
January 21st, 2009 at 5:26 pm
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January 26th, 2009 at 12:14 am
[...] a link to the article Inquirer gobbles its future. As things are shaping up within the Prieto-Rufino media empire, not only would the dinosaur [...]