Prestigious Princeton University just held a two-day conference called the Future of News, but much of the talk was about what future there would be for journalists, especially newspaper journalists.
Much of the discussion could be summed up by a comment by Gordon Crovitz, the former publisher of the Wall Street Journal who talked about the news business model:
When David (Robinson of Princeton University) told me that this panel was the economics of news, I wondered if this was a yes/no question.
But amidst a lot of gloomy statistics about the present, there was also an optimism, almost out of necessity, about the future of news, even if it would be done by a greatly diminished group of newspapers with dramatically fewer journalists.
The discussion was largely about newspapers and touched infrequently on broadcast news in the United States. The numbers are grim, and as The Economist recently noted, US newspapers are facing a rapid decline in readership and advertising. Echoing the 2008 State of the News Media report, speakers at the conference said that advertising was being decoupled from journalism.
Gordon Crovitz said that the newspaper business model hadn't changed for three generations, but now, he said:
The advertising is the big problem. Targetable media like online has made non-targetable media like newspapers and magazines very uneconomic. That does not favour mass media like newspapers and magazines.
Mark Davis, vice president of strategy, San Diego Union-Tribune, said that newspapers were failing to sell to small businesses and were losing market share to Google, which had established a self-serve model that made it easier for local businesses to buy ads without having to talk to a sales representative.
Eric Alterman recently wrote a piece for the New Yorker magazine about the crisis in newspapers, and he says that it's not only advertising but also trust. He teaches young people, and he said that they don't read newspapers.
Average age of newspaper reader in US is 56 and growing. If it was a television programme, it would only have hemorrhoid commercials. These are not people that advertisers want to reach. This has many implications.
Mr Alterman said that newspapers were losing online because they weren't the best vehicle to reach people. Currently, the New York Times employs about 1,200 people, and the Washington Post employs between 800 to 900, he said. With advertising declining at its current rate, he wonders if newspapers will be able to keep even half of that headcount.
And he worried that without a business model to support in-depth journalism that democracy would suffer and that people would be more susceptible to political manipulation.
Mr Davis said that he believed that the glass was half full, not half empty. He pointed to promising developments such as Yahoo's newspaper advertising consortium that would allow newspaper to greatly increase their targeting of ads not only based on geographical data but also data that Yahoo had developed about consumer behaviour. He said that newspapers should focus on products that were provided utility to their readers.
Mr Crovitz said he was optimistic in part because the industry had been so slow to adapt that they still had a lot of room for experimentation. The question for some newspapers will be how much longer they have to experiment.
