Keeping newspapers alive

The Economist ran a piece called “The strange survival of ink” in which they point out that despite predictions to the contrary, printed newspapers are doing okay, all things considered. They dealt with declining ad revenue and readership by cutting costs (mostly journalists), and were helped with much lower paper costs.

The article paints a confident picture of an industry that adapted to hard times, positioning itself to grow again in good times. Maybe, but I think that’s a bit overly optimistic.

Staff cuts obviously can’t go on indefinitely. As it is, one could argue that the quality of most newspapers has been falling in direct relationship to the declining number of journalists. Also, paper prices can begin climbing again at any time.

The Economist argued, “the key to success for most publications will be a dual revenue stream. Just as they do offline, newspapers will have to bring in both advertising and paying readers.” [emphasis added]. I couldn’t disagree more.

There’s no evidence that customers will agree to pay for what they’ve been getting for free pretty much since the Web began. Logically, pay-walls would require all news organisations to lock-up their content: If just one organisation broke ranks, it would be all over.

But even unanimous adherence to pay-walls wouldn’t be enough. As it is right now, people watch news on television, listen to it on the radio and read papers (online or off), then share the news with others through social networking. There’s simply no way for newspaper publishers to stop news getting out just because their content is behind pay-walls—there will always be people sharing news because it’s in our nature.

Advertising alone also can’t save newspapers, either, and revenues from both print and online advertising have been falling. I’ve noticed that some news sites are now requiring you to look at an ad that fills your screen before you’re allowed to access the web page, in much the same way that video news sites put ads at the start of their videos that you must watch before viewing the video. For print web sites, that strikes me as a bit of desperation.

So, newspapers need to find new and creative revenue models. The “dual revenue stream” model just isn’t good enough anymore and won’t work for the longterm. If they can’t, then we may see traditional news gathering companies fade away in favour of newer models, like maybe journalists cooperatives something else entirely.

Journalism is vital to functioning democracy. One way or another, we’ll have to find a way to pay journalists. Without them, freedom itself is in danger.