Re-thinking Newspapers after Fairfax staff cuts: Part 1
The buzz word ‘convergence’ has kept me thinking all week about the career in journalism.
I was reading Stephen Quinn’s ‘Convergence Journalism: The Fundamentals of Multimedia Reporting’ over the weekend, and it’s been an eye opener.
I had always wanted to get into traditional newspapers, but the situation is getting more trickier with decline of newspaper reader consumption and lack of advertising. Today, advertisers are more focused in advertising online and that’s where reporting is in some way heading.
Traditional media companies like newspapers are expanding into online platforms. There is a cross promotion of different products across different media, and journalists are reporting on the same story for several different outlets.
Stephen Quinn says “convergence produces many challenges for both journalists and publishers… in a way they need to find a way of telling the truth and making money”
Newspapers readers and consumers are getting their news information online. Gen Y, according to Phil Meyer author of The Vanishing Newspapers, traditional newspapers are being ignored by the young, instead they respond to online entertainment stimuli, which means they will get news from online news sites and even social-networking sites.
It’s evident that advertising revenue has shifted from newspapers broadsheets to online creating stress for the survival of newspapers, see what’s happened at Fairfax.
Journalism professor Roy Greenslade from London’s City University says mass newspapers are in decline due to the rise of the Internet. Everytime there is less advertisers and consumers, elite newspapers are more likely surviving with their readers rich enough to keep funding it. (i.e. The Australian Financial Review)
He says “newspapers made vast profits on the back of journalism, and this is where I can be critical of employers –they did not necessarily put those profits back into journalism. So what have they done? Directly their profits have come down, they haven’t cut the advertising staff, because they want to get the advertising staff get the little advertising there is. Let’s stick it to the journalists, and that’s the problem. We’re actually seeing that collapse going on”.
Fairfax made this evident when CEO David Kirk said in the SMH that the cuts were “not just a reaction to today’s market conditions, but it’s a reaction to the realisation that we have to be lean and more agile and fundamentally a different company if we want to succeed in the modern media world”.
“They don’t really have a choice; the pressure is on the ad revenue,” said Andrew Anagnostellis, of Deutsche Bank. While Steve Allen, the managing director of media buying agency Fusion Strategy, last week forecast spending on newspaper ads would fall 1.5 per cent this year.
See the full story on SMH
Read Part 2 Section
