The Economist on the decline of newspapers, and the revival of the press:
Economist.com: The future of newspapers: Who killed the newspaper?: The most useful bit of the media is disappearing. A cause for concern, but not for panic
"A GOOD newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself," mused Arthur Miller in 1961. A decade later, two reporters from the Washington Post wrote a series of articles that brought down President Nixon and the status of print journalism soared. At their best, newspapers hold governments and companies to account. They usually set the news agenda for the rest of the media. But in the rich world newspapers are now an endangered species. The business of selling words to readers and selling readers to advertisers, which has sustained their role in society, is falling apart....
Britons aged between 15 and 24 say they spend almost 30% less time reading national newspapers once they start using the web. Advertising is following readers out of the door. The rush is almost unseemly, largely because the internet is a seductive medium that supposedly matches buyers with sellers and proves to advertisers that their money is well spent. Classified ads, in particular, are quickly shifting online....
Newspapers have not yet started to shut down in large numbers, but it is only a matter of time.... Jobs are already disappearing. According to the Newspaper Association of America, the number of people employed in the industry fell by 18% between 1990 and 2004. Tumbling shares of listed newspaper firms have prompted fury from investors....
Having ignored reality for years, newspapers are at last doing something. In order to cut costs, they are already spending less on journalism. Many are also trying to attract younger readers by shifting the mix of their stories towards entertainment, lifestyle and subjects that may seem more relevant to people's daily lives than international affairs and politics are.... So far, this fit of activity looks unlikely to save many of them. Even if it does, it bodes ill for the public role of the Fourth Estate....
Journalism schools and think-tanks, especially in America, are worried about the effect of a crumbling Fourth Estate.... But the decline of newspapers will not be as harmful to society as some fear. Democracy, remember, has already survived the huge television-led decline in circulation since the 1950s.... And it will surely survive the decline to come.... Publications like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal should be able to put up the price of their journalism to compensate for advertising revenues lost to the internet--especially as they cater to a more global readership. As with many industries, it is those in the middle... that are likeliest to fall by the wayside.
The usefulness of the press goes much wider than investigating abuses or even spreading general news; it lies in holding governments to account... in the court of public opinion. The internet has expanded this court. Anyone looking for information has never been better equipped.... "Citizen" journalists and bloggers is itching to hold politicians to account. The web has opened the closed world of professional editors and reporters to anyone with a keyboard and an internet connection....
For hard-news reporting--as opposed to comment--the results of net journalism have admittedly been limited. Most bloggers operate from their armchairs....
An elite group of serious newspapers available everywhere online, independent journalism backed by charities, thousands of fired-up bloggers and well-informed citizen journalists: there is every sign that Arthur Miller's national conversation will be louder than ever.
And:
Economist.com: The newspaper industry: More media, less news: THE first thing to greet a visitor to the Oslo headquarters of Schibsted, a Norwegian newspaper firm, is its original, hand-operated printing press from 1856, now so clean and polished it looks more like a sculpture than a machine. Christian Schibsted, the firm's founder, bought it to print someone else's newspaper, but when the contract moved elsewhere he decided to start his own. Although Schibsted gives pride of place to its antique machinery, the company is in fact running away from its printed past as fast as it can. Having made a loss five years ago, Schibsted's activities on the internet contributed 35% of last year's operating profits....
Unfortunately for the newspaper industry, Schibsted is a rare exception. For most newspaper companies in the developed world, 2005 was miserable.... Even the most confident of newspaper bosses now agree that they will survive in the long term only if, like Schibsted, they can reinvent themselves on the internet and on other new-media platforms....
At first, from the late 1990s until around 2002, newspaper companies simply replicated their print editions online.... Another early mistake was for papers to save their best journalists for print. This meant that the quality of new online editions was often poor.... For the past couple of years, however, newspapers have been thinking more boldly about what to do on the internet....
The big problem is that readers online bring in nowhere near the revenues that print readers do. All but a handful of papers offer their content free online, so they immediately surrender the cover price of a print copy....
The secret of making money online, according to Schibsted, is not to rely on news aggregators like Google News and Yahoo!. Three-quarters of traffic to the websites for Schibsted's VG and Aftonbladet comes through their own home-pages and only a quarter from other websites. “If visitors come from Google to stories deep in the paper and then leave,” explains Mr Munck, “Google gets the dollars and we get only cents, but if we can bring them in through the front page we can charge €19,000 [$25,000] for a 24-hour banner ad.” In spite of this, most newspapers still depend on news aggregators....
Coverage of national and international news is in any case a commodity often almost indistinguishable from one newspaper to the next. This impression is exacerbated as papers seek to save money by sacking reporters and taking copy from agencies such as Reuters. “Our research shows that people are looking for more utility from newspapers,” says Sammy Papert, chief executive of Belden Associates, a firm that specialises in research for American newspapers. People want their paper to tell them how to get richer, and what they might do in the evening.
Few newspaper companies like to hear this and they tend to ignore the research they have paid for....
The most shocking development for traditional newspapers has been the wild success of free dailies, which like the internet have proved enormously popular with young people...
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