Newspapers are in big trouble. Ad revenue is down. Subscriptions are down. In short, income is dangerously down. Nonetheless, newspaper consumption is at an all-time high, but the vast majority of the increase is on the Internet. I can read the LA Times, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and even (presuming you can endure their website) the Arizona Republic online…for free. You might say that the web is like a parasite, killing its own host as well as all the derivatives that depend upon it. If newspapers actually went away, some estimate that 80% of all the news content on the web would go away. I personally know that without newspapers, I couldn’t do my job half as well as I do. In short, a free press may wind up not existing if the press actually becomes free. So, the question is whether as a society we should be trying to do something to save them? How important are the newspapers really, and to what degree does our society need them? And, concluding that we do, what can (or should) be done to fix the problem of their decline? In short, does the newspaper meltdown constitute a pressing and legitimate public policy problem?
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Links:
How to save your newspaper (Walter Isaacson)
Is online journalism on its way out? (Howard Kurtz)
What would micropayments do for journalism? (NY Times blogs)
You can’t sell news by the slice (Michael Kinsley)
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