Forms of discontent about journalism that weren

Well, the happy coincidence is over, and we’re going to need to face some harsh realities. Here at Newspaper Next Central we’ve spent a lot of time looking at other industries that have gone through what the newspaper industry is going through at the moment, and we’ve found the experience of Kodak particularly enlightening. Some of the things that Kodak has experienced are directly translatable:
1. Our newspaper businesses will be smaller, just like Kodak’s film business, which shrank dramatically. That doesn’t mean our overall businesses will necessarily be smaller, although certainly that will be true for the near term. (See item 2, below.) Kodak is smaller than it used to be, but wildly profitable again, because they figured it out in time.
2. It will be a while before new revenue streams make up what will be lost from print advertising, and we need to face that as a reality. Kodak’s digital revenue didn’t grow as fast as its film business shrank, but if they hadn’t made digital a priority that revenue wouldn’t have grown at all. We can’t dismiss new revenue streams because they’re not big enough.
3. Half of a typical market has already voted that the newspaper is not its preferred source of information, just like Kodak film employees were using digital cameras at family gatherings. Instead of beating them up to change their minds, which they’re not really inclined to do, let’s focus on what other information, which might be nothing like news but will be just as critical to their daily lives, our organizations can provide. This effort doesn’t necessarily have to fall to newsrooms, but if we don’t do it somehow, another player will and we will have lost yet more of our local footprint.
4. There ARE new revenue streams out there, but there’s no one silver bullet. We’ll need to look at an aggregation of small-bore solutions rather than one big behemoth like print advertising. That means new capabilities on the sales staff, new ways of charging customers, new ways of interacting with them, etc. Most newspapers have been really slow off the mark with this, and they continue to resist it at their peril.

So, now that the happy coincidence is over, I would suggest the question should be, How can we assemble an array of revenue streams and an array of information products that support and enhance our journalism functions and expand our value and utility among our constituencies?

If society is unwilling to support journalism, and it has demonstrated that amply, who cares about ethics and professionalism?

This is well said. The issues you raised are so relevant to my country Ghana.

At the dawn of multiparty democracy in 1992 also came a proliferation of the media as never before in the history of the country.

But by and large, they are mostly set up to make money and so the focus of journalism has greatly shifted from telling the news as it is to projecting personalities, businesses and politicians.

This trend has rendered journalists and media organizations that want to serve the fundamental purpose of journalism redundant.