As existing newsrooms have certain inbuilt cost structures, newspapers should strive to do a better job of making use of the internet to generate revenue, as well as to rethink their news products
The future may be looking decidedly bleak for the newspaper industry in the US, but for Joshua Benton, Director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, there is still cause for optimism.
“I’m a pessimist for existing newspaper companies. I’m a total optimist that there’s going to be more information available to consumers and to readers than there has ever been the case before,” says Benton, speaking to INSEAD Knowledge on the sidelines of the Reporting New Realities media conference held recently in Hong Kong.
“You want to make sure you don’t have a certain amount of cannibalisation, you want to make sure that you’re collecting circulation early and you want traffic all at the same time,” says Chua. “And there is not sort of a Goldilocks solution but there are ways you can tweak it to get a bit of everything.”
[This article is republished courtesy of INSEAD Knowledge, the portal to the latest business insights and views of The Business School of the World. Copyright INSEAD 2024]