PressEthic

After having read several articles about Knight Ridder Inc.’s stockholders pushing the company to sell, due to its declining stock price, I was somewhat depressed. So, I decided to start actively hunting for some positive news about newspapers.

That is when I happened to come across this article, which had a few theories about why newspapers are not a thing of the past just yet. It was asking one of the most relevant questions of our times. ‘Can media survive the digital revolution?’

What Google now does to daily newspapers isn't really new; they're just better at it. Ancillary media have always ripped off the dailies. Even the best in national broadcasting use them to set their agenda.

Well, it was most encouraging to read this information. Blogs and online media have surpassed major daily papers in a number of areas, which include a more casual style of writing, an increased trend towards editorializing and of course easy access. But-the fact remains that national dailies still have the most important role in gathering and disseminating primary information, and forming public opinion.

The article also discussed the issue of how online journalism is more vulnerable to becoming a tool in the hands of its advertisers, as opposed to conventional media.

But what AOL is doing to its editors is awful: undermining its own integrity and undercutting all journalism. More than ever, AOL is driven by advertising dollars. The more times a page is viewed, the more money it makes. As an interactive medium, it's easy for them to link specific editorial content with advertising results. "Every time you click," writes the AOL editor, "our page views go up we get more ad dollars then I get promoted."

Media, as it has been pointed out time and again, is after all a business that will be evaluated for its profit and loss margins (refer to Knight Ridder scenario). However, a concentrated effort needs to be made to keep the content of any news source strictly separate from the products or services it advertises. I am not living in some fantasy land and understand that this goal can never be achieved fully. But--what does scare me is the increased acceptance this practice has started to receive. Some dismiss it as business as usual, others cynically claim, oh it’s a capitalist world after all, but fewer and fewer can muster up the energy to assert that it is just plain wrong.

Now, in the broadest terms this is how any medium works, from movies to magazines. More people means more revenue, and so on. But between an interactive news product that targets a narrow audience, and a printed newspaper in search of a wider one, the differences are distinctive. Interactive writers can quickly become slaves to instant ratings; while paper journalists are buffered by the relative inefficiency of print, and protected by a long tradition of willfully ignoring a newspaper's advertising.

Bottom line, all I am trying to say here is that even though newspapers are ( as we are warned everyday) facing some stiff competition from alternative sources, they are not obsolete yet. Maybe in a few years, online media will develop itself into a more self sustainable model, but currently it is too dependent on the very newspapers it is supposedly putting out of business.