In 2010, The Economist did a significant about-face with the headline, “Whatever happened to the death of newspapers?”
What, indeed? Just four years earlier, the same magazine declared that newspapers were collectively endangered and even gave a graveyard date of 2043.
The Economist was not alone. For at least two decades, pundits, technology-watchers and even publishers have been predicting the demise of the printed delivery of news.
There is no doubt that North American and European papers have taken a bit of a kicking recently. First, the internet exploded into people’s lives and suddenly everyone expected information for free. More recently, the recession brutally savaged advertising lineage, turning many papers into skinny little things that looked like they might at any moment starve to death.
Read Also
Agriculture needs to prepare for government spending cuts
As government makes necessary cuts to spending, what can be reduced or restructured in the budgets for agriculture?
Food has returned to the table since the recession, but some other good things have also happened.
Some publishers have accepted that real ink supports journalism, and therefore are supporting real ink. Internet advertising has not proved to be the panacea many were hoping for.
Furthermore, newspapers are becoming lighter on their feet. They are learning to find their readers and provide what they want to read.
For example, Mary Garden of the University of Sunshine Coast in Queensland notes that there has been a “tabloid revolution” in South Africa, where papers have started to serve the black working class previously ignored by the press.
In fact, newspapers outside North America and Europe have churned along reasonably well. Garden noted that in 2008, a recession year, circulation worldwide grew 1.3 percent.
Readers, meanwhile, are beginning to understand that not all information is created equal. You can find a lot of information online but how much of it can you trust? Was the source or writer someone with a bone to pick, something to sell or hawking a political message?
This is not the same as absorbing information from a trained, hard-working journalist who tries to impart the news in a palatable, understandable and objective way, the journalist who slogs through reports and actually talks to people.
How does this affect you, The Western Producer reader? Tune in next week for part two of the newspaper survival story.
