As Kore mentioned last week, technology is taking over people’s jobs and various businesses. A good example of this is in printed news. Just this month, 38 newspaper employees of a paper in Dallas were laid off from their jobs. Because popular newspapers are now available online, and for free, newspapers are beginning to lose their revenue. At first, I thought that the online advertisements would be equally as costly, but online advertisements are actually much cheaper to purchase than printed advertisements. With declining printed newspaper purchases and without sufficient funds from advertisements, how will newspapers be able to afford their staff?
Thursday Morning Open Thread: To Boldly Go…
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5 comments:
I remember a time when the San Francisco Chronicle's sports page included nearly a dozen pages, where sports events were detailed in two, sometimes three full-length articles. But lately, the Sports section has been decreasing in size, with fewer articles and larger graphics. This is indicative of the point you make Lexi, that a decrease in revenue from the paper sales has contributed to the decline in the amount of content in the papers. It seems that advertisements occupy a larger portion of the paper than they used to.
You can also relate this issue to the elasticity of demand. Supply for printed newspapers is elastic, because if prices continue to rise, and take up a larger portion of peoples' incomes, people are more likely to stop purchasing the printed copies of the papers, and rely on the easily accessible substitutes, the websites of the papers, for news. (It has been my experience that although online newspaper websites often do not offer the complete paper, requiring people to pay a monthly fee to view the whole paper, but it seems that either people are satisfied with this trade-off or have decided that the fee is minimal compared to a yearly subscription to the paper.)
The following link contains a survey of how many people read printed papers versus the online alternatives, and as expected, even in two years, the amount of people who read printed newspapers has fallen dramatically. http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1133/decline-print-newspapers-increased-online-news
Although the link contains data from 2008 at the latest, the trend that the graph demonstrates proves the point.
I think that instead of asking the question, "how will newspapers be able to afford their staff?" Maybe the question should be whether or not newspapers should still be produced. If I can easily read current events online for free, instead of paying money for a newspaper, then what is the incentive to continue printing them?
It has no longer become cost effective for small-scale newspaper companies to produce newspapers that no one will be willing to buy. While some might argue that there are people who will continue to purchase and read newspapers just because it is more authentic or original to get information that way. That reason alone does not justify the continuation of newspaper production.
Perhaps it is time to digitalize news?
I think Alex raises a very good question. That is very true. I was thinking more along the lines of that even if they are not printed at all, newspapers will still exist on the internet, and internet ads will not generate enough money to pay for a good staff; that was unclear.
I would also propound the "pay-to-read" strategy that many newspapers are now employing online. The New York Times ran a special column feature called "TimesSelect," in which readers paid for access to popular opinion columnists. The program generated nearly ten million dollars in revenue, but ultimately the newspaper scrapped the program because the restriction was alienating potential readers. True enough, traffic doubled after the removal of TimesSelect. There are obviously different methods of charging online readership, such as subscriptions or even charging after a person has viewed more than a set number of articles. However, most polls (http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10433893-93.html) show that very few people are willing to pay for such a service. Furthermore, such surveys reveal that the younger a person is, the less likely he or she seems to be interested in reading the news. Thus, if this trend continues, newspapers might have to fight for their entire audience.
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