A very thought-provoking post. I’ve been reading snippets about a whole lot of newspapers either closing down or going to an only-online mode, but it was only recently that this became a very real possibility in India – when Ergo, a weekly tabloid from The Hindu that had a primary readership among IT employees (along the IT Corridor) also decided to become available only online.
Newspapers have never made much money from subscriptions – their primary revenues come from advertisements. From this perspective, this whole argument is game-changing: either that model has to change where their primary revenues will now come from subscriptions; or newspapers online will continue to be free – with some innovative way of attracting advertisements (and therefore revenue).

The Hindu has been trying to redefine their business to say that they are a media company – and to that extent have now diversified into Television also (NDTV Hindu). So there will definitely be synergies in terms of news aggregation. How this will translate to significant revenues is something they will still need to figure out.

Here are a couple of examples –

Without the support of a major newspaper, would Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodard been able to break a story like watergate? Even a freelance blogger needs sustained revenue to be able to work on investigative stories.

And on the other end of the spectrum, we have Perez Hilton, a blogger/gossip monger cloaked as a journalist. He does not need the support of any media giant.

And what about op-ed columnists? I love to read Friedman and Krugman on NY Times. Would they start maintaining their own “pay” blogs? Or have blogs with revenue streamed in via ads?

And then you have something like “Huffington Post” that today is a mish-mash of blogs, news and gossip. Now, I do not know how bloggers such as Paul Begala are paid.

But I feel one of the things which we might miss is this – Generally newspapers report what they think is important to the people even if we are not really interested, we generally tend to read those front page articles. But in an online world, we can easily skip what we dont want to read and we can just go to the topics that interest us and read. This I
think will be the major loss if there are no newspapers. That is a grave situation as people will be well informed but only on their topics of interest. Newspapers being limited for space, used to filter out unnecessary articles and include only those which were deemed useful for consumption. Though there are good and bad effects of this, we will miss the good effects of this.

And hence we need to preserve the newspapers in some form or other but as we are going in the direction of more freedom and doing only what we want to do, I dont see any way to save the newspapers in current form except large scale subsidization.

Thanks for visiting. I read your well stated thoughts on this subject. I think there is a difference between bloggers who can post just facts and journalists. I can see blogs and tweets for emergency situations, where someone happens to be in the right place at the right time. However, for day-to-day news such as a president’s news conference (what you call reporting facts), why would a blogger write about these. And if they did, what is their revenue model? Blogs can be used as a medium of communication, but someone has to pay these bloggers for reporting.

But you did make me think about the the fact that TV, radio being primarily entertainment portals, while new papers are portals for facts and journalism. Would people be willing to subscribe and pay for news. I think yes – if the price is right and if they are provided a choice.