Newspapers are here to stay

— Ranen Kumar Goswami

The high birth rate of television networks is a death threat to newspapers, so goes the popular perception. Some pompous preachers are writing obituaries, especially at seminars in Western cities. Yet some others say the market is exhausted, real journalism will be on television, and there is no future in smearing black ink on dead trees and getting child labour to deliver it on cold mornings.

But proving all of them wrong, newspapers have refused to die. Simon Jenkins, who writes for The Guardian, says: “Most of this doom-talk emanates from America, where newspaper circulations have indeed been falling for decades. The popular view is that this is because of competition from television and the internet. The electronic media offer more readily accessible information. As a result, not a year passes without another noble title sinking like a battleship in Pearl Harbour, its reporters enacting the Front Page for gleeful television cameras.” In a signed article in January 2006, Jenkins wrote that, “in 1981 the outlook for British papers was indeed grim. This is not because they were losing money – most had relied on outside support for years – but because their production and editorial methods were inflexible and deterred competition. Even so, daily circulation was little changed from 20 years earlier, hovering at a million either side of 14 million...... British popular newspaper sales have continued to fall, from 13 million overall in 1965 to less than 9 million today. But they are a separate publishing market. Upmarket newspapers show a reverse trend. Their daily circulation has defied every pundit, rising by a third since 1965 from two million to close to three million. The figure for the serious Sunday titles is the same today as it was then, 2.7 million.”

In India too, there’s no room for despair. Leading media watchers point out that with newspapers in ten different scripts and 13 major languages, the newspaper revolution in the country is unparalled anywhere else. Renowned political scientist Professor Robin Jeffrey, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, La Trobe University, Australia, in his scholarship on the growth of successful newspapers in a dozen Indian languages over the past three decades, highlights a lively and buoyant situation. He says five factors are mainly responsible for this. They are improved technology, which enables the production and distribution of larger numbers of more attractive newspapers; steadily expanding literacy; expanding purchasing power; aggressive publishing that is driven by profit, power and survival and seeks expansion; and political excitement. In Professor Jeffrey’s opinion, for the past decades, the Indian regional language newspapers have provided the hinges for the idea of a nation. The end of the Emergency and the beginning of the 1990s spurred the growth of the regional Press, catalysed by the communications revolution. Between 1976 and 2001, newspaper penetration trebled and daily circulation increased six-fold. In 2005, advertisement revenue in the print media exceeded 2000 million US dollars. The daily circulation of newspapers saw a steep rise even during the 1990s when satellite television made rapid inroads. However, as newspapers have become a mass industry, they have lost their political potency as they are vulnerable to pressures from the government and advertisers. Also, the increasing corporatisation of media houses poses more of a threat to a free many-voice Press than the prospect of foreign direct investment, says Professor Jeffrey.

N Ram, Editor of The Hindu is of the view that television is rapidly closing the gap with the print media in terms of advertisement revenue and financial clout, but the quality of its content delivery needs to be critically examined. Ram’s view, as expressed in speeches he has made in various fora, is that despite a statistically modest reach, the internet has profoundly affected journalism practice. Issues such as tablodisation of content, the role of market forces, the devaluing of editorial content, Rupert Murdoch-style price wars and rampant corruption are increasingly under examination. On the other hand, the National Readership Study in all its recent surveys has shown that readership of daily newspapers is on the rise. They now reach over 200 million people across the country. There are at least more than a dozen dailies which are part of a ‘five million club.’

But the scene in America seems to justify the doom-talk. A study conducted by journalist Tyler Marshall and the Pew Research Centre’s Project for Excellence in Journalism has concluded that the state of the American news media in 2008 was more troubled than a year ago. Carried out in the first quarter of 2008 and published on July 21, 2008, the study was based on two primary sources of information: face-to-face interviews with editors and other newsroom executives at 15 daily newspapers across the United States and the responses to a 43-question survey, administered by Princeton Survey Research Associates International (PSRAI) and sent to editors of 1,217 daily newspapers. The Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ), a part of the Pew Research Center in Washington DC, is a research organisation that specialises in using empirical methods to evaluate and study the performance of the Press. The website of the study is http://journalism.org/node/11961. A chapter in the study is “The Changing Newsroom,” which says: “Meet the American daily newspaper of 2008. It has fewer pages than three years ago, the paper stock is thinner, and the stories are shorter. There is less foreign and national news, less space devoted to science, the arts, features and a range of specialised subjects. Business coverage is either packaged in an increasingly thin stand-alone section or collapsed into another part of the paper. The crossword puzzle has shrunk, the TV listings and stock tables may have disappeared, but coverage of some local issues has strengthened and investigative reporting remains highly valued. The newsroom staff producing the paper is also smaller, younger, more techsavvy, and more oriented to serving the demands of both print and web. The staff also is under greater pressure, has less institutional memory, less knowledge of the community, of how to gather news and the history of individual beats. There are fewer editors to catch mistakes.”

The study captures the American newspaper industry in the grip of two powerful, but contradictory, forces. On one hand financial pressures sap its strength and threaten its very survival. On the other, the rise of the web boosts its competitiveness, opens up innovative new forms of journalism, builds new bridges to readers and offers enormous potential for the future. Many editors believe the industry’s future is effectively a race between these two forces. Their challenge is to find a way to monetise the rapid growth of web readership before newsroom staff cuts so weaken newspapers that their competitive advantage disappears. The study claims itself to be an attempt to document where newspapers are in that race. In short, where is the industry headed?

According to the survey, the majority of newspapers are now suffering cutbacks in staffing and even in the amount of news they offer the public. The forces buffeting the industry continue to affect larger metro newspapers to a far greater extent than smaller ones. In some cases, these differences are so stark it seems that larger and smaller newspapers are living two distinctly different experiences. Fully 85 per cent of the dailies surveyed with circulations over 1,00,000 have cut newsroom staff in the last three years, while only 52 per cent of smaller papers reported cuts. Recent announcements of a further round of newsroom staff reductions at larger papers, including the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and the Washting Post, indicates these differences may be widening further.

On the other hand, newspaper websites are increasingly a source of hope, but also of fear. Editors feel torn between the advantages the web offers and the energy it consumes to produce material often of limited or even of questionable value. A plurality of editors (48 per cent), for instance, say they are conflicted by the trade-offs between the speed, depth and interactivity of the web and what those benefits are costing in terms of accuracy and journalistic standards. Yet a similar plurality (43 per cent) thinks “web technology offers the potential for greater-thanever journalism and will be the saviour of what we once thought as newspaper newsrooms.” Despite an image of decline, the study informs, more people today in more places read the content produced in the newsrooms of American daily newspapers than at any time in years. But revenues are tumbling. The editors expect the financial picture only to worsen, and they have little confidence that they know what their papers will look like in five years.

Some negative signals notwithstanding. We would go back to Simon Jenkins: “ Newspapers are, like books, damned by futurologists because their medium, print on paper, is antique. In truth they have shown that they can grasp each new technology, including computers, and bend it to their will. What Gutenberg invented no one has bettered. Dead trees live. Read on....”
source: assam tribune