Newspapers won't die
2009-04-26 13:24
Austin, Texas - Even though their look and operations may be different, newspapers have a future in the journalism world if they learn how to survive in a competitive field, former Dallas Morning News publisher Burl Osborne said on Saturday.
"Now the consumers have taken charge - they decide what news is," Osborne said. "Monopoly power vanished. The existence of a competitive marketplace is permanent. And we should have known and we should have anticipated that."
Osborne, former chairperson of the board of The Associated Press, started his speech at the Texas Associated Press Managing Editors' annual convention by mentioning Twitter, the social networking website that limits messages to short "tweets." He said his tweet about newspapers is this:
"The future of newspapers: Yes. Shape? Don't know."
Challenges
He said the challenge facing editors and publishers who are trying to get newspapers out of today's "pretty terrible mess" is to find the right model for pairing a digital product with a print one and to find a way to grow online revenue to offset the decline in print revenue.
Journalism that holds public institutions accountable will continue to play a major role for newspapers, which will need to report the news honestly and credibly, Osborne said.
Newspapers continue to have dedicated readers, many of whom are part of the baby boomer generation and have 20 to 30 more years to live and are willing to pay for print editions, he said.
"We still have a very large print audience we should not walk away from," Osborne said.
He suggested newspapers of the future may be smaller, heavily centred on local news and almost certainly carrying less debt. He said newspaper organisations will be "leaner, meaner, more aggressive, more tightly focused."
"Taking out costs is going to continue," he said.
Newspapers had been in a near-monopoly, assuming unprecedented amounts of debt and believing "the party would go on forever," even with the arrival of the internet, Osborne said.
"We didn't accept the fact that the monopoly was gone," he said. "And even with the clouds upon us, the bubble continued to grow. And then all at once it burst."
But, Osborne said, no new medium has ever destroyed an old one - so far.
- AP