Save Our Press

I stumbled upon two interesting posts on the IFRA website.

http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2008/04/the-great-unbundling-newspapers-the-net/

While it’s painful to hear, I think the writer has hit upon a truth:

In a 2005 interview, the Rocky Mountain News asked Craig Newmark what he’d do if he ran a newspaper that was losing its classifieds to sites like Craigslist. “I’d be moving to the Web faster,” he replied, and “hiring more investigative journalists.” It’s a happy thought, but it ignores the economics of online publishing. As soon as a newspaper is unbundled, an intricate and, until now, largely invisible system of subsidization quickly unravels. Classified ads, for instance, can no longer help to underwrite the salaries of investigative journalists or overseas correspondents. Each piece of content has to compete separately, consuming costs and generating revenues in isolation. So if you’re a beleaguered publisher, losing readers and money and facing Wall Street’s wrath, what are you going do as you shift your content online? Hire more investigative journalists? Or publish more articles about consumer electronics? It seems clear that as newspapers adapt to the economics of the Web, they are far more likely to continue to fire reporters than hire new ones.

Speaking before the Online Publishing Association in 2006, the head of the New York Times’s Web operation, Martin Nisenholtz, summed up the dilemma facing newspapers today. He asked the audience a simple question: “How do we create high quality content in a world where advertisers want to pay by the click, and consumers don’t want to pay at all?”

The answer may turn out to be equally simple:  We don’t.

http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2008/04/what-newspapers-and-journalism-need-now-experimentation-not-nostalgia/