Leaving the Newspaper Industry

A little over two years ago I graduated college and found myself working for a newspaper company in the heart of Manhattan. Truthfully, I wasn’t a newspaper reader and still find the waste of paper and pure clumsiness of reading one unnecessary. So it was only right that I ended up doing online business development instead of anything related to circulation and column inches. However, I recently decided to leave the world of media and have the opportunity to less worriedly reflect about its current position and its shaky future.

Working on digital strategies for an old media company is exactly how it sounds really; an exciting challenge that can often be frustrating. Unless you’ve been under a rock for the past few years, you’ll know that newspapers aren’t really thriving and support and sympathy aren’t plentiful either. I do sympathize with their position but share in the unencouraging critique of many others.

Sympathy stems from the fact that in many ways newspapers pioneered sharing content online and built the business models and advertising formats that sustained their business. Only recently, with increased bandwidth and advancements in streaming technology, are the TV and movie industries coming into the online world. Oddly enough, platforms like Hulu are only following the same path of free content as newspapers did 10 – 15 years ago and they too will face the same problem of cannibalizing one medium for another. Newspapers entered the wild west of the internet and are definitely showing the scars to prove it.

However, I still am very critical of the steps that old-school media have taken to ensure their future. Newspapers have simply thought of their visitors as readers rather than a community. Why crowd-sourcing information and community engagement have only become recent topics for newspapers is beyond me. Moreover, if newspapers only took a moment to realize that they were technology providers they may have been able to create the Twitter and Facebook of the world well before the term web 2.0 was even coined.

I’ve noticed that while newspapers haven’t received much sympathy from critics, journalism unfortunately has. In the long fought battle of journalism vs. blogging, the outcome will inevitably be blogging. This is truly a digital renaissance and it simply is not acceptable that content creation is removed from product development, sales, and marketing.

Bloggers are the real renaissance men and women of a digital era. As bloggers, we buy our own domains and hosting, install the background CMS, design and code the site itself, do the research, create the content, optimize for search engines, edit and post it, conduct blogger outreach, create a social media following, and we sell and create the revenue and business models to make it all worth while.

A journalist, in most instances, is removed from all of this except for the content creation and this is a huge factor in the problem facing the newspaper industry.

Time will tell how this all plays out as it does with everything else but I do believe that drastic consolidation will face these corporations. Many are simply too large with too many redundancies to meet the needs of a quick and nimble digital world especially without a sustainable business model. I met and worked with some true innovators of the internet over the past two years but I will definitely sit more comfortably from the sidelines and watch as the industry salvages its future.