When the ICFJ asked me to send them a list of newspapers I would be interested completing my fellowship at I sent them a list of five (in a random order):
a.) The New York Times
b.) The Washington Post
c.) The St. Petersburg Times
d.) The Miami Herald
e.) The Wall Street Journal
The New York Times just did a sale-and-lease-back of its office tower in downtown Manhattan to make it through the year, the Washington Post just noted a 77 percent decrease of its turnover according to German weekly “Die Welt” and the Miami Herald today announced that it would cut 19 percent of its workforce accumulating to 175 people losing their jobs. So basically my choices have been cut down to three papers, the St. Pete Times and the WSJ being my favorites for their (up until now) solid economic situation as well as for their reputation.
Which leads me to the point of this post: I am 27 and thus spent a good part of my life reading news online. For 6 years now I have been working as a print journalist. While I am still an avid reader of blogs and online news I have never believed more in print than today. I know this will get some readers to chuckle, but I firmly believe that printed news, in one way or another, will always be around in one way or another. So from my point of view publishers hoping for salvation by switching to an online-only edition will inevitably fail. Why? Because up until now – aside from the usual ad-revenue – hardly any of them have come up with a model that will allow them to keep readers while making substantial amounts of money. Generally you could say that in an online world where “free” as in “free content” almost always seems only a click away readers are gone faster than you can say “pay me”. If you are not depressed enough by now, here’s a list compiled by Time Magazine – 10 majors US newspapers who could go down next. However there is hope, though it may take some time for the sun to rise again:
There is, however, a striking and somewhat odd fact about this crisis. Newspapers have more readers than ever. Their content, as well as that of newsmagazines and other producers of traditional journalism, is more popular than ever — even (in fact, especially) among young people.
The problem is that fewer of these consumers are paying. Instead, news organizations are merrily giving away their news. According to a Pew Research Center study, a tipping point occurred last year: more people in the U.S. got their news online for free than paid for it by buying newspapers and magazines. Who can blame them? Even an old print junkie like me has quit subscribing to the New York Times, because if it doesn’t see fit to charge for its content, I’d feel like a fool paying for it.
This is not a business model that makes sense. Perhaps it appeared to when Web advertising was booming and every half-sentient publisher could pretend to be among the clan who “got it” by chanting the mantra that the ad-supported Web was “the future.” But when Web advertising declined in the fourth quarter of 2008, free felt like the future of journalism only in the sense that a steep cliff is the future for a herd of lemmings.
(Walter Isaacson, Time Magazin)
I believe.
Hello! This post could not be written any better! Reading through this post reminds me of my previous room mate! He always kept chatting about this. I will forward this article to him. Pretty sure he will have a good read.
Write more, thats all I have to say. Literally, it seems as though you relied on the video to make your point. You definitely know what youre talking about, why throw away your intelligence on just posting videos to your blog when you could be giving us something enlightening to read?. Thank you for sharing!