A new global survey of editors reveals that the majority believe newspapers will be free in the future. By a large majority — 86 percent — of the 704 editors from the U.S., Western Europe, South America, Eastern Europe, Russia, the Middle East and Asia, these execs also expect their newsrooms to become more tightly integrated with their online, digital products in the years ahead.
The editors also identified the two greatest threats facing their industry as the declining number of young people who read newspapers (Duh!); and the growth of the Internet (Double Duh!). Two-thirds believe the most common form of news distribution will be electronic (online or mobile) within a decade.
Somewhat more surprising, nearly two-thirds also believe that some traditional editorial functions will be outsourced in the future.
Meanwhile, analyst Peter Osnos of The Century Foundation, has issued a report about “The Myth of Free News.”
“There is a great deal of money being generated by the transmission of news, but very little of it is going to the providers of that news,” he writes. “News is no more free these days than the ‘complementary’ bag of pretzels you get on a plane, after you’ve paid for the ticket.”
He goes on to add up the average costs consumers are paying for broadband, cell phone service, and satellites, plus the cost of the lap-tops, PDAs, televisions, and iPods — all of which deliver news to their audiences. Then he identifies Google, which makes money from advertising on news, Verizon, getting rich off transmission of news, and Apple, fat with cash from its hardware sales that display news, as among the main winners under the current model.
You know where this is going. In contrast to the hundreds of dollars a month the above services and products cost consumers, a New York Times subscription requires a paltry $5.10 per week.
The solution? Osnos believes the companies redistributing the news should be paying fees to those who create it, a la the cable TV subscription model.
For now, he has this parting advice for editors: “[L]et readers know that they are paying, handsomely, for the news they get on the Web. It’s just not going to the people who gather it.”
Amen!
