The Newspaper Industry Is Dying Before Our Very Eyes

http://www.coastalpost.com/09/01/07.html

by gravitycop • 18 years ago

7 13 18 years ago

gravitycop• 18 years ago

From the article:

The average entry-level reporter's wages are $25,167 a year, according to Payscale.com. And today's beginning reporters are asked to do more than those starting just a few years before. "In some cases it means being able to go out and report the story, write for online, shoot video, edit from the field, and update for the print edition. And in some cases it means shooting the pictures, creating a slideshow, putting it in Flash, and doing all that in addition to reporting," [...]

These are the low-pay jobs. There are also the no-pay jobs popular with Web site management. Young journalists are encouraged to blog and post on a variety of no-pay Web sites. This is supposed to help them find employment, and it probably does. But it certainly does violence to the old slogan of a day's work for a day's pay.

Or, journalists can hustle grants from foundations or wealthy individuals to pay for their reporting.

brandnewlow2• 18 years ago

I've never met a journalist who got into it for the money. So that explanation never convinces me.

Reasons I have heard for why people do it:

1. Anger at wealthy elites and politicians. 2. Desire to tell people the truth about what's going on. 3. Likes to see their byline out in the public. 4. Enjoys meeting random people, having access to the rich and powerful across many segments of society. 5. Can't hack it as an actor, celebrity, but still wants some measure of fame and glory. 6. Likes to tell stories.

I've never met anyone who went into journalism to get rich. Most I know have more or less decided they're going to be poor for a long time to come.

But they have great stories at parties.

satyajit• 18 years ago

Its sad. Given the internet age, the newspaper story comes little late - people have taught themselves to find the news as current as few minutes ago, or even live coverage on internet. So newspaper industry needs a revolutionary shift in order to survive. And with so much available to read these days, who really has time to go through a thick news paper? So may be they need to trim it down. Advertising is another story altogether - even I believe TV advertising revenue is going down as more and more people switch to DVRs, they skip thru the ads. Technology is the culprit to make all these obsolete, and by technology, I mean you :-)

johngunderman• 18 years ago

Quite frankly, I don't see this as being too much of a problem. The main purpose of newspapers is to inform people of happenings in the world (duh). With the advent of the internet, this has become less and less necessary because individuals now have a plethora of outlets from which to receive their news. They no longer are constrained to buying a package of papers in order to learn what is going on around them. I'm not saying that newspapers are bad, quite the opposite. I just figure that printed news is no longer as important as it used to be.

The author mentions he is worrying about who will be the "watchdogs" of the politicians, etc. This worry is ungrounded. One only has to observe such things as the blogosphere to know that as long as the internet is not a censored medium, we will have our watchdogs. I'll admit that with user generated news the average quality of news decreases. This is only due to the quantity of "worthless" news that circulates the net. I think that the newspaper industry will never die completely, as people do enjoy reading from paper. Still, it must drastically shrink according to basic economics. It can only be as large as demand allows it to be. There is no reason to consider this a "bad thing".

Tichy• 18 years ago

I wonder about the more costly research, though. What about dangerous investigations (for example in war zones). Blogging might not pay for everything that is necessary. That said, ultimately I hope that things will turn out OK somehow...

dougp• 18 years ago

http://www.michaeltotten.com/ this journalist travels all over warzones and is independant.

lacker2• 18 years ago

How many newspapers or TV news outfits are providing completely redundant coverage of, say, the violence in Gaza right now? They can't at the same time (a) all cover the same exact story and (b) have me feel bad if 99% of them cease to exist.

Don't worry, there will at least be a few newspapers left. But a city doesn't need its own war zone investigators any more than it needs its own cable news channel.

volida• 18 years ago

of course print will die. It's so last century What else did you expect?

shafqat• 18 years ago

I think the future of news is intelligent, curated, aggregation. People aren't going to a single trusted source anymore. News organizations that can become to go-to news hub that aggregates the latest/best stories from around the web, and supplements it with local and editorial, have a chance of winning. At NewsCred, we're working on a bunch of interesting projects to enable this...

iron_ball• 18 years ago

Aggregate what? Quality reporting is difficult and expensive.

lacker2• 18 years ago

Newspapers won't disappear entirely. The point of aggregation is that by filtering and organizing the news, even if there is only 1% of the amount of quality reporting as there was in 1990, you can still get better reporting overall.

I would prefer a Hacker News based on only 1% of the original reporting that there is today, rather than a fully funded New York Times.

micks56• 18 years ago

The father of a friend of mine from college sells software that newspapers use to do their layouts as well as the printers that make the papers. His customers include the very large newspapers across the US as well as the smaller local papers.

My friend told me in 1999/2000 that his father had declining sales. More and more papers were either not buying the next version, putting off purchasing decisions, or simply going out of business or consolidating.

So the 1999-2000 time frame is obviously not pre-internet. But I think there are other factors besides people reading the newspaper on the internet instead of buying a print version.

I canceled my subscription because the delivery person couldn't get it to my front door. Sometimes the paper landed on the roof of my house. Sometimes he put it in the snow in front of my house. Other times it simply got rained on.

I also think the custom of reading the daily paper is going away. People aren't just reading the paper online instead of in print. They are watching the 6pm news instead of reading the print paper. Maybe even more people aren't doing that.

The Newspaper Industry Is Dying Before Our Very Eyes

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