How is The Technology Destroying the Newspaper Industry?

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Technology and automation is supposed to grow any industry

It is usually believed that introduction of technology is great for any industry. It is supposed to make processes more efficient, lower the cost and facilitate access to information much faster and hence returning higher value for the investments.

Technology did not help newspaper industry too much

For the newspaper industry technology has almost performed in the reverse fashion. At least 120 newspapers have been shutdown since January 2008. More than 21,000 jobs have vaporized at 67 newspapers printing companies. The chain that owned big publication like Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times have gone bankrupt. Three other Michigan publications are reducing their publications to three days a week. This has been mostly because of massive decline in advertising revenue since the news industry has been moving more and more online.  2008 was the worst year in terms of advertising . Total advertising revenues went down by 16.6 percent to $ 38 billion according to the latest figures from National Association of America. Recently NY Times reported a profit of $ 20 MM in profits after 2 straight years of losses. Even then the shares went down by 10%. Reason was the gloomy outlook presented by the CEO on future revenues for NY Times.

Print Advertising Is on the decline

If you dig deeper to research further into this, the data is even more concerning. The print advertising across the industry alone declined 17 percent, the classified revenues declined 30 percent and online advertising also went down by 2 percent. So why is this happening? Have people stopped reading news? We all know that people have started moving online for reading news but that should mean that revenues also shift to online revenues. The reason why that change did not occur was that as you move online, the security of your data also goes away. As soon as you put something on your site, millions of people replicate your information in various different ways that it becomes hard for search engines to penalize them.. Hence the revenues which should be going to the newspaper industry gets spread out and even reduced.

Impact of dying newspapers on common people

So how does it impact you and me? For the last 2 centuries newspaper industry has been the backbone of our democracy. The death of these newspaper industries would mean death of reliable information on our politics, economy and society. It also means internet which currently prides itself in bringing information to lot more people faster and cheaper would only contain junk information for the most part. This is not good for any one.

How to solve the problem

Is there a solution to this problem? Luckily there is. In today’s world there is nothing like copyrights for newspaper publications . Governments throughout the world need to impose more stringent copyright regulations. There should be stricter rules against piracy. Search engines should penalize duplicate content much more harder. The industry also needs to identify new sources of revenue generation like Times Magazine has started charging for online content.

We believe the government should come and interfere before we see the death of a very important pillar of democracy in US and everywhere in the world.