Online media posse a big threat to survival of newspaper

July 9, 2009

By Khalfan said    

A US based editor has urged print media personnel to give information to people in the way they want, at the same time striving to provide what they actually intended to give out regardless of a business threat being posed by online media.

This observation gives me an impression that  a significant challenge is facing print media outlets not only in developed countries but also  in developing countries including Tanzania. Obviously and, in most cases print media will surfer a lot. In combination with global economic downturn there is no doubt that in five to 10 years newspaper circulation will decline.

In our day 5th of a  month-long extensive training in Journalism here at University of Maine, in the North-East of the United State of America, I and my group members had an opportunity to visit one of the leading media houses in Bangor, the capital of State of Maine, called Bangor Daily News. (BDN).

When we arrived at the BDN building we were received by the Managing Editor Michel J. Dowd and other senior staff members at the lobby before starting a tour of the newsroom and see for ourselves the operation in different departments. Indeed, every one was busy in he/her computer.  

After a brief tour then we had an opportunity to participate in news planning meeting, just like postmortem if you like. But, theirs, is different from what we use to practice in our newsrooms back home  where by every journalist is obliged to attend. 

The meeting began at 10:30 am and the attendees were the Managing Editor (ME) and departmental editors. The most interesting thing to me was seeing the ME chairing the meeting with a single copy of day's newspaper. The entire team had to discuss mostly on the layout and not the contents like we normally do in our newsrooms back home.

After paper review session, each head of department presented his plan before members of the meeting made decision on which will be story A (Lead story) and front page photo from the plan that each head of department had presented. So this was a very good experience to me.

The BDN's Managing Editor, Michael J. Dowd gave us  a brief history of the company that is owned by a family. Many questions were asked by our group during a questions and answers session. Personally I was interested to know two things, how the company confronted the economic downturn and the impact of online newspaper to the future of print media.

In his response to the first question, the ME, said, economic crisis doesn't spared them, it hit hard and they have to reduce the size of the printing paper from 32 pages to 28 pages. "This is big challenge to us and we are wrestling on how to secure our future," he said. 

Another big threat in newspaper circulation is online newspaper. During the multimedia presentation, the Editor of New Media, an online media  owned by BDN, Jeff Tuttle expressed his fears saying that: " Nowadays, majority of readers opt to go for online newspapers. Of course, this will reduce the number of subscribers,"

However, he was still optimistic when he said:  "everything is possible provide that we give people in the way they want...and, I am sure we are capable of doing that,". According to Jeff, about 20 percent of people who have never subscribed to the newspapers have now subscribed to the online products of the company.