The Pulitzer Prize Award for journalism was recently awarded even as the faltering newspaper industry struggles to survive. 2009 alone witnessed the end of newspaper editions of The Chicago Sun Times, The Rocky Mountain News, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer (founded during the Civil War) and The Christian Science Monitor. (Both the Seattle paper and The Christian Science Monitor will remain in online editions).
Although many newspapers still manage to produce a healthy profit, the industry has been in a gradual, but consistent decline for the last 45 years. The current economic crisis has paved the way for bankruptcy. Hundreds of journalists have been laid off and circulation rates continue their descent. The new media - the Internet, cell phones, iPods, computers, movies, instant messaging, video games, the radio, PDAs and especially television - now all compete for our attention.
America's founding fathers believed freedom of the press to be important enough to include it in the First Amendment and could not envision a democracy without print. Thomas Jefferson once said, "Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter." However, the time when Americans received their news and information mainly from the printed word is now only a distant memory.
Perhaps the problem is not that readership is declining but instead that fewer people are paying to read. People have rapidly become accustomed to the notion of reading newspaper articles online for free. According to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, the Internet, which emerged this year as a leading source for campaign news, has now surpassed all other media except television as an outlet for national and international news. 40 percent of participants said they get most of their news about national and international issues from the Internet, which would mean that newspapers are actually reaching more readers than ever.
Is the long-term future of the journalism profession in question? Not necessarily. Survival will depend on putting some muscle behind the concept of breaking out of captivity from the print style only. Getting users to pay for news provided on the Internet will be the key. This idea of paying for content on the Internet is not without precedent. The majority of Internet-generated money (mostly from advertising) has ended up flowing to groups that do not actually generate much content but instead capitalize on it: search engines and Internet providers. YouTube and Google's video-sharing sites have reaped enormous benefits from the online video audience.
No, I'm not rich, and I realize this won't be a popular path to take among current and potential readers. But as long as articles remain available online for free, people will not pay money to read them. Which means that the creativity and effort of journalists will go unrewarded, a fact already evident with the plunging profits, increasing staff layoffs and frequently filed bankruptcies of newspapers even as the number of online readers continues to climb. Today's aspiring journalist might decide tomorrow that a career in writing is not financially viable and opt to become an investment banker instead, a move that will not bode well for the future of the journalism profession. If content can be provided on the Internet or on a device in such a way that people will prefer it over reading on paper, people will pay. Some people will balk now, but if content is cheap and easily accessible, most people will pay. Charging people for articles will also force journalists to value content and therefore strive to produce high-quality writing to maintain their audience.
If the day when readers pay a nickel for a news article is not easy to envision, look to the iPod. It was Apple who first understood the appeal of a truly great piece of technology. After Steve Jobs created the iPod and linked it to the iTunes Music Store, people started paying for songs again, at a time when free downloading was at its peak and CD music sales were dwindling. To date, Apple has sold more than billion songs on iTunes. Perhaps the newspaper and magazine industry can replicate the success of the iPod.
I'm suggesting this idea because journalism is important, and people still want to hear the news. Newspapers are trusted sources of information, guardians of the free marketplace of ideas, and they cover local events in a way that national news organizations cannot.
