Before I graduated from Ole Miss in May, I had to write and defend a 75-page honors college thesis on the future of newspapers. I paid special attention to all published State of the Media reports from the Project for Excellence in Journalism as I was doing my analysis. If you havent checked the PEJ’s report, you should. It’s amazing.
My findings weren’t much of a surprise to me or any of my journalism professors – the writing has been on the wall for a while now. Circulation is down (though readership is up in some places), advertising revenues are down. Web site views are up and increasing, but few papers have found a way to make enough money off their sites to support their print product. The public opinion of newspapers continues to drop, thanks to publicized scandals, conflicts of interests and decreased quality. And all of this is compounded by increasing cuts in staff and resources necessary to put out a consistently good product everyday.
Which is why it saddens me to see things like this, but no longer shocks me:
• So long, Wall Street journal editors
• We’ll miss you AJC team
• Aloha in Honolulu
I concluded at the end of my thesis defense that I believed newspapers that invested in their reporters, photographers and editors and provided them with the resources and support they needed to do their best work would see revenue gains. Quality is directly linked to revenue, I said. Mass layoffs and buyouts fly in the face of quality and make readers even less confident in the product that hits their front porch and newsstands everyday.
Are newspapers really the last of a dying breed? I want to make my career with these things. I’m hopeful they can turn it around for my sake, and the sake of the millions of readers who count on them – despite insisting they don’t.
Posted by journofile 