Week 6

Who will pay for Journalism???

This week’s presentations helped me to develop an understanding of the situation journalism is in today in regards to funding but also to understand the possibility of newspapers dying out in the future. This is a very serious issue because newspapers are providing the very jobs that I am completing a Uni degree for. For decades Journalism has been funded by advertising in newspapers and with globalisation and new technologies, the media is moving online. This creates a major problem as to how quality, investigative journalism will continue to be funded.

Mitchell used good quotes and examples in his presentation to help identify the ideas that newspapers are near an end. One was the Media Watch quote “The newspaper platform.. is a dead duck.” Another example was the Time Magazine feature on the ‘Information Age’ and the person of the year is ‘You’. This reignited the debate over citizen journalism and the use of the internet by the media to provide instant news headlines. I thought the use of a graph showing the evolution of news media was excellent. He had a good overview of the merge from print to online journalism through a technology savvy society. Mitchell sparked interesting discussion about the future of professional journalism in Australia.

An interesting term that I hadn’t previously heard was mentioned by a student. This being ‘rivers of gold’. This term is used to describe Murdoch’s classifieds in his newspapers. For decades journalism and newspaper production have been supported by the revenue that classified bring as well as advertisements. As we have learnt so far, this revenue is significantly declining as technology improves and commercial interests move online. The public are also using the internet to buy and sell online as it reaches a larger audience and can be less expensive then using the classifieds in the paper. There are numerous sites online dedicated to selling specific items eg.carsales.com or domain.com. Some people now use cross-media advertising to achieve a better result but ultimately this is having an effect on newspapers which are struggling to exist due to lack of funding. It is interesting that Murdoch has changed his tune about classifieds being ‘rivers of gold’ by saying "sometimes rivers dry up." For me this confirms the need to be concerned about the future of journalism and newspapers in Australia.

If ad revenue is declining publishers must look beyond advertising for revenue so that they can continue to both fund investigative journalism but also continue to print. But where is this revenue? I personally can't see a funding model for serious journalism in future, not one that will pay for large staffs with specialists, and foreign correspondents and stringers, everywhere. I can't see Ads paying for big operations that cost tens of millions of dollars. Websites can attract millions but not the necessary tens of millions.

Journalist Andrew Keen suggests that ‘Pay-per-page view’ is the future of journalism. Keen spoke at a Media Futures Conference in England earlier this year and explained the theory of the ‘Gawker model’, where contributors to the blog aggregator are paid in relation to the number of page views their copy generates. Keen believes that this will be ‘the new reality of journalism’ and that newspapers will inevitably adopt this model as online metrics become more sophisticated. Adopting this pay structure though could affect the quality of the journalism produced online. When you have more and more ability to define how many people are looking at your work, you'll be paid accordingly and it’ll result in writing becoming a popularity contest. This is definitely a worry. It is hard to say who will be pay for journalism in the future but many ideas are being considered and something like this could be possible.

Andrew Keen, Media Futures Conference:
http://www.journalism.co.uk/2/articles/531797.php