The Future of Newspapers
Or no future at all?
How is the future of the newspapers going to look like? This is a serious question for the publishers as well as the readers. The numbers of subscribers and sales of the print versions has continuously dropped since the millennium, especially since around 2008, when smartphones made their way into everybody’s lives. The smaller readership of the printouts leads to smaller income through advertising, which is the main source of revenue for most of the newspapers. Because of this many newpapers have been cutting salaries and jobs which has, in turn, affected the quality of journalism.
Since the internet became more easily accessible, especially on mobile devices, newspapers were under pressure to react and have been extending their online presences, e.g. by providing more and more online information on their websites, developing own apps, and, of course, frequently posting content on facebook. But since the competition on the internet is huge many of them are struggling to find methods to earn money for providing articles. On the one hand many readers are not willing to pay for readings and just switch to other free news sources. On the other the online advertisement revenues are tiny compared to the ones in the print versions. You can say facebook and google have a monopoly on these earnings. Also the use of ad blockers harm websites.
So newspapers have no choice but to act. But how may the future of newspapers look like and which chances are there to avoid becoming irrelevant? The numbers of prints are most probably keeping to decrease. Especially daily newspapers may want to rethink printing on a daily basis. Weekly German newspapers like Spiegel and Zeit, for example, are less affected in terms of subscribers. Also filling a niche could help not only to keep readers but maybe even to become crowdfunded. The quite popular German leftist newspaper taz is, more or less, mainly financed by crowdfunding. The same applies for the format Krautreporter which was even founded on the principle of crowdfunding to be independent. Other possibilities for newspapers are to outsource revenues into lucrative branches to remain being able to afford journalism, or to find wealthy (philanthropic or maybe even manipulative) investors who prefer having shares in a newspaper than making money.
I also had the idea that a couple of German or other European newspapers could become more internationally active. Maybe they could appeal to a more international audience by providing translated news in different languages and trying to establish an importance as internationally relevant news sources from a regional perspective (in opposition to other regional perspectives). Examples could be the New York Times and Russia Today. The problem with these is, though, that the first one might be unique by successfully implementing a paywall and the latter bein funded by the Russian government. A large, international audience does not necessarily solve financial problems.
Perhaps another strategy, also to get rid of the facebook monopoly over media, could be a collective platform for newspapers only, where subscribers accept watching ads to support publishers and the entire revenue belongs to them. In addition or as a completely different approach subscribers to the platform could make a monthly payment to be able to read and watch news adfree, just like it has been working for Netflix besides competing with illegal but free websites to watch movies and series. Unfortunately both of these possibilities are probably not practicable, as people will always be able to find ways to avoid ads and as they are far more interested in entertainment than in news.
It is hard to come to a conclusion now, because all the strategies I listed have their downsides. We will moste definitely see some more newspapers going down and maybe, maybe some of the ones which are able to convey their importance to their readers, and even more their financial supporters, will stay with a stable number of prints in the future media landscape.
