Keeping Journalism Alive

Journalist are so important in today’s day and time because all their information that they gather and put out is what the public reads and hears about. Though not as many people may read the newspaper as often as in the past, the newspaper is so important because many times that’s where reporters will take their information from. The problem we are facing with keeping news media alive is that nobody wants to pay for it anymore. People today are so used to being able to get their news for free that they aren’t willing to pay for it anymore. We as a society need to find a way to keep it alive.

As normal human beings who have busy lives we aren’t able to go to important political meetings and debates but that’s why we have journalists to inform us on the news about it all and what happened. As consumers we want all of this information we are receiving to be correct but everyone also wants the information instantly. The issue with this is with all the reporters and journalists competing to get the information out first mistakes will be made. This means information might not always be correct. As stated in the John Oliver video journalists are expected to do everything, this includes: tweeting, video, images, online posts, the newspaper, etc. The results of having to do all of this in such a limited amount of time is simple and that’s incorrect information.

In an article that is about the future of the New York Times, it talks about how their main source of income is from their paying subscribers and that they value those consumers over trying to reach out to a large amounts of audience quickly. While they want to continue to make their content very reliable and information that their paid subscribers want, rather than the ones that get their news for free, there is a small issue. While it makes sense for them financially to provide for a small group of paid subscribers the ad-supported digital model makes it difficult. The model has made it so that well written journalism content is shared with a much larger scale of people which is highly valued.

In another article it talked about how they needed to find a happy medium between paywalls and news being completely free and leaving the newsroom. An idea they believed could work is Native advertising. “Native advertising and other new approaches could be a way for local news outlets to win back advertising dollars lost to competitors such as Google and Craigslist.” By putting in these “ads” that don’t seem like ads and fit in with the article content it could bring in lots of revenue and keep the consumers happy.

In the Future of Journalism Podcast by Nicco Mele, he mentions brand advertising. This allows for building and creating relationships with consumers over time. He also mentions it might have to move to government funding too. Another point he brought up was that they want to find a way to be independent and not be dependent on business funding them. I personally believe that we as consumers will eventually just have to realize that we will need to pay for our news if we want to keep it alive.