The future, or otherwise, of newspapers

Off topic post on journalism

Having started my career in journalism in a local newspaper it’s distressing to hear about the severe affects of the recession on the regional press, as set out in a piece in yesterday’s Guardian. The headline is Where the Hell do we Go Now?, which sounds a little over-dramatic until you read the article. We are not just talking job cuts, we appear to be witnessing something much more fundamental – a structural change in our media landscape, no less. Those that are being made redundant simply see no way back to the career they had set their hearts on. A former photographer at the Stoke Sentinel Jonathan Bartholomew sums up: “What is happening is quite extraordinary. It is impossible to get another job in newspapers.” This is clearly much more than cost cutting across local newspapers – the business model (based on classified and recruitment advertising) simply does not work. And as the piece points out, replacement revenue streams such as from online have yet to mature.

The head of the largest regional newspaper group, Sly Bailey, claimed in today’s FT that the regional sector was under “immediate peril” unless government acted to allow mergers between big groups, such was the crisis.

And it’s one that is playing out even more dramatically across the pond. A swathe of local journals are closing and switching to the web, including the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post -Intelligence. The issue is set out comprehensively in another piece in the FT headlined When Newspapers Fold. Here’s a flavour of what it’s getting at:

Obituaries for the news business are being written in newsrooms around the world as advertising revenues that long subsidised the cost of newsgathering shrink, just as digital media usurp print

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