News Futures

So the economy is down. Ad revenues for print media have trended down for at least 5 years: 2007 to present. Trend lines do not point for recovery of past volumes. What does this mean?

Simply stated, print journalism does not have the revenue needed to cover the news as fully as it once did. Reporters are either freelancing, ‘permalancing’, volunteering, or employed full time at low pay. Only ‘stars’ get compensated highly, and that’s because they are viewed as circulation boosters. More readers, more ad hits, higher ad rates and more ad volume.

Of course there is plentiful competition for print media: network TV news organizations, cable network TV news, major Internet news groups, usually with special interest focus; and of course bloggers and commentaries in the hundreds of thousands appearing daily on the Internet. Think this blog.

Cable TV and electronic competition spread ad revenues over a much wider user market, thus lessening what’s available for print media. With more consumers getting their news from electronic media, ad revenues are drying up for print media.

This is important because print media has usually developed and maintained a more detailed research machine and archive. TV news organizations do not do as well in this arena, plus they have a larger market territory to serve so the research and archive machine has much less depth than typical print media outlets.

In our Illinois community we have a volunteer newspaper. We cover local news, much of it in depth with background white papers on archive to support that depth. We cover what larger news organizations simply cannot; they do not have large reporting staff to do this in depth work in smaller communities and counties. We feed our news up the news chain to Google and Internet connections. We get paid nothing for this sharing. But when a story is interesting enough large regional papers send out their staff for coverage.

Two conclusions can be made from these opening paragraphs:

1.      News coverage will remain thin for stories close to home unless local citizens support volunteers to do this job

2.      New technology will continue to force new communication channels to develop; these will be highly productive and cost effective as news sharing protocols emerge

A third conclusion may be made but it is pretty tentative: the reliability of future news operations will be only as good as the citizens demand it to be. Not just the readers; but the citizens of a community or region. It is in their interest that news be accurate, timely and reliable. It cannot be turned on and off. It must have consistency if it is to adequately report the context in which the news occurs.

News is news, one might say? No, it is not. All news emerges from a context, a background of events and players, even long-term evolution of civic values viewing the unfolding history. All of these elements are important to understanding a news event.

Some will say history is events, happenings. To that I urge people to see history as “cause, event, result.” The occurrence of an event only makes sense if we come to understand why it happened and to what end result. This is important stuff. If we understand it well, we can guide future actions intelligently and effectively. If we don’t we are destined to repeat the same avoidable events.

As our abilities strengthen over time our society will develop discernment. That benefits our society by producing better planning, better understanding and less manipulation of facts. May we arrive at this point sooner rather than later!

November 15, 2011