Print isn’t dead – The Future of Journalism in America
Journalism.
Saying the word conjures thoughts of layoffs, pay walls, shrinking ad revenues and smaller newspapers.
It’s a pretty depressing thought to most people – unless you’re one of the four panelists at “The Future of Journalism: Transforming the Fourth Estate” at the 2010 Bulldog Reporter Media Relations Summit.
The panelists – Ellen Levine, Editorial Director for Hearst Magazines; Rand Morrison, Executive Director of “CBS News Sunday Morning;” Alan Murray, Executive Editor of the Wall Street Journal Online; and Jai Singh, Managing Editor of the Huffington Post – agreed that journalism is actually in a great position because the opportunities to interact and engaged with the audience is greater than ever.
“Journalism itself isn’t in trouble, the delivery, length, etc. is,” Levine said. “It will change. It will adapt.”
There is no lack of information hunger both in the industry and among readers, there’s just a revolution in the delivery systems and business models of the product.
For a long time, newspapers, magazines and consumers worked under the idea that people will get the news for free, but that business model is changing as organizations attempt to keep up with changing technology and subsidize the loss of ad revenue in any way possible.
This is already being seen with organizations like the Wall Street Journal adding a pay wall to their online content, and magazines like Wired publishing on an iPad app.
“Technology aspects will play a bigger and bigger role,” Singh said. And Levine agreed, citing the iPad as a huge game changer in the industry.
But Levine, who works primarily in print unlike the other panelists, disagreed with the idea that print is dead.
“When I drop my iPad into my bubble bath and not electrocute myself or ruin it, then I’ll admit that print is dead,” she said.
She doesn’t see print completely disappearing, but rather sees two different plans for print: luxury and cheap.
The cheap version of the news will be consumable and disposable. It will be printed on a lower-quality paper and cost less. The luxury version, however, will be printed on paper that is better quality and a larger size.
“There is still a market for print,” she said.
She also sees magazines moving towards a new subscription model. Currently, most subscription prices are highly discounted because magazines want to keep their subscription numbers levels inflated to attract advertisers, while the newsstand copies costs up to 200% more.
Levine sees a company like Hearst, which currently has 14 magazines with a high cover price, moving towards a subscription plan that isn’t discounted. Instead, the magazine will cost the same amount of money no matter where it is purchased, and they’ll hold themselves to a high standard so that what people are getting for that price is great.
Moving away from print discussions, all of the panelists agreed that the style of journalism is changing.
“Long is shorter than it used to be,” Morrison said. Not many pieces are 3,000 words anymore, but that doesn’t mean people won’t read 500 or even 1,000 words.
People will read or watch long, in-depth pieces, but they must be well written or edited and compelling when presented digitally.
And while it’ll be hard to convince anyone who has tried to find a job in journalism in the past two years, all of the panelists said that there are jobs out there.
“Journalism is fun and more exciting than ever,” Murray said. “However, you need to be at the very cutting edge of multimedia.”
The best young journalists are those that know how to build a following in social media, they are credible and fact check and they are consistent as they move from one medium to another.
Murray also joked, however, that any young journalists might want to reconsider their career goals and make their fortune before shifting gears to writing as any jobs in the industry don’t pay much.
Flickr photo courtesy of Valerie Everett
Liz Harter has a degree in English Writing with a minor in Spanish from Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Ind. She is an award winning journalist on the collegiate level with a strong background in journalism. She currently works in PR and is a social media autodidact Google+
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Right after you posted this to Twitter, Contentini posted a related piece. Did you see it?
“Paper to readers: Comments now cost 99 cents and your name” – http://bit.ly/a9tuDL
Thanks for sharing, Dave. I didn’t catch that, but I’m following them now.
I’m not sure whether I should be amazed that this might actually work or disturbed that they’re throwing a pay wall into the mix of what are essentially Letters to the Editor 2.0. At least they’re trying to integrate technology that they previously shied away from into their business plan.
I love reading comments on highly volatile stories where people go nuts on mundane occurances (most recently, I read horribly angry comments about the fact that the University of Notre Dame donating thousands of dollars to the surrounding community. Apparently that was the worst thing they could ever do). Comments are often entertaining, and part of that entertainment comes from the trolls who like to play devils advocate. This may scare some of them off. At the same time, it could be a decent solution to keeping those people that exist solely to comment negatively on horrible incidents like deaths, kidnappings and shootings off of the boards.