For the past week I’ve read words of writers, listened to comments of classmates and watched clips of videos in where they all proclaim that the journalism profession is dying a slow and painful death. Due to lower circulation and heavy losses in advertising, experts are already announcing its premature death. If this is the case all of the Journalism majors out there should petition their universities and colleges for refunds.
Don’t get me wrong, I can understand their arguments, but why has it only been recently that everyone has focused on the this issue? The degradation of journalism isn’t new; It wasn’t lying in wait for a recession to hit and take the whole of the journalistic community with it. Yes, journalists, writers, editors, news photographers, and many more have lost their jobs in recent months, but why are the criers so quick to blame capitalism and the Internet for massive casualties incurred? In all honesty, I would look internally before I started placing blame on outside events.
And what are those events that the news industry believe are killing it?
- The Internet happened. It’s here and it’s not going to be dying anytime soon. As this is most certainly the case, wouldn’t it have made more sense to begin working on new forms of advertising and revenue generating opportunities way before now? The news industry let itself be crippled by thinking that print advertising would always be the be it and end all, and because of this they have no one to blame but themselves for allowing the current state of affairs to unfurl. Instead of crying out the supposed death of their industry they should be working towards shifting their ways of advertising and thinking about how to bring in money from the Internet. People are willing to pay for the news they want. Prime example: How many people a year pay for their local paper to be delivered without even thinking about it? If the paper service suddenly stopped, yes there would be a halt of payment for some time, but I can bet that people would sign up for online content editions. People miss what they are accustomed to. You just have to change their way of thinking about it.
- No one cares about the news. Whoever says this obviously has never seen my Google homepage that has boxes from CNN, Times News, C-NET and USA Today. No, I do not have a physical paper delivered to my apartment every week, but I open my Google homepage on average of 20 times (maybe more) a day. Stories are filtered in through those boxes and, more time than not, I find myself clicking on an article. This then turns into me reading another article and then another. I like the news just fine and if I am curious about something I am going to seek out the information about it whether that be through blog posts, articles, or Wikipedia entries. It is not that people “do not care about the news” but do not care about certain types. Example: A staunchly conservative Catholic is going to be more inclined to pay for news coming from FOX News than they are to pay for an LGBT new Channel. This is just the way it is. Yes, it may make some of the population ignorant, but people are already ignorant in their choices when things are free. Do you think implementing a payment system for online news is really going to exacerbate the problem further?
I believe the news industry will survive with the same caliber of content that we are all used to, but it will just reside in a different form. There will be growing pains felt with any large scale change, but change needs to happen regardless of how difficult the process might be.
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