How can newspapers survive

As a result of the pressure on finances, journalists are now expected to do more for less. This means they have even less time and work in a much more high pressure environment. What is likely to happen in the future?

In every market there will be less national newspaper titles. There will be less national journalists. The role and stature of a national journalist will greatly diminish. Has it gone already? More newspapers will adopt a pay or subscription model. Titles are beginning to realise that putting a value on their content is the only way to get users to value their content more.

The following revenue streams will be significant to newspapers: Online advertising. Conferences and events. Partnerships that leverage their audience or tribe for a fee. Native content — where they leverage their talent to write content for brands that people want to read.

Special supplements and publishing experiences. Digital content — video and audio storytelling. Streaming access to live events. These include: Dating Apps. Book Clubs. Property Sites. Job Adverts. The day that senior national journalists command great salaries as a rule is over. The very high salaries will be the preserve of a small elite group. Local newspapers will remain relevant for the following reasons: Reading a physical newspaper once a week still makes sense.

Then they need to stop trying to be the bucket, too. Small town media know all too well how expensive it is to build and maintain sophisticated digital platforms. In the expanding "American news desert," low-tech print media are going bankrupt as Charles Munger put it because of a technological change. While their traditional transport medium has become obsolete, the current preferred transport medium is, in fact, working against them.

Even their primary sources for national and world news compete with local media online. Once upon a time, people learned about the world from the point of view of their home town. The news of the day was about things occurring within a few miles of home, and global events seemed distant. Electronic media closed that gap to such an extent that now it seems the telescope has been turned around.

Rather than viewing the vast, impersonal everything from the point of view of one's self and one's community, we view our individual lives and those of our loved ones and friends forced through the lenses of the vast, impersonal everything. It's our own communities that seem distant.

People consume media on ubiquitous media platforms, accessed via vast global telecommunications carrier networks. There is no perception of distance on global networks. There is no "here" there.

A site in France is no different than one in Macedonia or Billings, Montana. To make matters worse, there is no perception of scale either. A big corporation, a small one or even a fake one can all look alike on a digital appliance. It's all trees; the forest is invisible.

If you publish a small-town newspaper — or a newspaper of any size — you look similar to any other site serving media content. The advantage of local media is presence. No ubiquitous platform lives in the same community as local merchants and citizens. The problems in the local news business are so widespread and severe, communities across America are in danger of losing their last surviving daily newspapers. The die-off has already begun.

The Great Recession of left many news outlets struggling and depleted; the current economic crisis now threatens to become a mass-extinction event.

Local news is struggling even in the East Bay and Silicon Valley, home to some of the most affluent and highly educated readers in America. With fewer journalists, papers inevitably offer less of everything that readers care about, whether it be coverage of local budgets, high-school sports, arts and entertainment or land-use decisions.

And when there are no reporters watching, there may be no exposure of corrupt local officials , lax construction safety regulation or controversial developments that unexpectedly win approval. The publication you are reading is fortunate, having been rescued by a new local owner in , following a unionization drive by our journalists. But the Los Angeles Times is losing money and faces many of the same challenges as other newspapers; we recently implemented furloughs and pay cuts, among other cost-saving measures, as well as selling three community newspapers.

To avoid more layoffs, we are taking part in a work-sharing program that allows eligible employees to reduce their hours and receive unemployment benefits. Some would argue that it is time to abandon traditional newspapers , and to throw support behind the burgeoning nonprofit-journalism movement.

But the rise of nonprofit news, however laudable, is nowhere close to — and may never reach — the scale that would be needed to make up for the reduction in original reporting by newspapers. And that loss affects other local news sources as well.

Thus, changes in the health of one medium — newspapers — ripple through the entire local news economy, prompting recalibrations among all media. Some help for newspapers is under discussion. But much more needs to be done to help local news organizations manage not just the pandemic, but also the transition to the internet era and the migration of advertisers to other platforms. There are a number of other steps the federal government should consider that could make the local news business more sustainable without compromising its independence, including:.

Such a shift could open the door to treating subscription fees as tax-deductible charitable contributions, which would be a boon to readers.