EDITORIAL: Newspapers should become more than just ink and paper

‘ ‘ ‘ The Christian Science Monitor, a well-respected international newspaper, announced… ‘ ‘ ‘ The Christian Science Monitor, a well-respected international newspaper, announced yesterday that it will end its daily print edition and move to a once-weekly print edition with heavy emphasis on online content. ‘ ‘ ‘ During the last few months, many major newspapers have cut thousands of jobs and drastically restructured their newsroom and business operations to stay in business. The Los Angeles Times is undergoing a 200-person reduction in staff, and Gannet Co. Inc., the largest newspaper publisher in the United States, is planning on cutting about 10 percent of all news jobs. ‘ ‘ ‘ The fundamentals of the newspaper business are shifting severely. The Internet and its ability to deliver content instantaneously to anywhere in the world has changed the importance of print journalism in a way with which traditional business models cannot keep pace. ‘ ‘ ‘ The simple fact that many major newspapers have separate print and online editions is only one example of this. ‘ ‘ ‘ Newspapers have been slow to capitalize on local online distribution and social networking as well, something that many of the largest and most popular information sites like YouTube and Facebook were quick to base themselves on. ‘ ‘ ‘ It’s a shame that many venerable and respectable newspapers are forced to cut, lay off or buy out staff members just to sustain their operations. But if print journalism is going to survive, newspapers must take advantage of the Internet and all its capabilities and adapt to the new media marketplace. ‘ ‘ ‘ The Christian Science Monitor is an excellent example of this trend. The paper was founded in 1908, has won seven Pulitzer Prizes, has writers based in 11 countries around the world and was one of the first major world newspapers to turn to online publishing, which it did in 1996. Despite this, the print edition of the newspaper has consistently failed to make a profit and struggled to find a sustained workable business model. ‘ ‘ ‘ This could be seen as representative of the entire newspaper industry. Online readership for many newspapers has never been higher, yet papers cannot turn profits and have to cut operations. However, cutting operations leaves less content to fill the papers, causing less people to buy them. Simply, newspapers simply can’t compete with free online content. ‘ ‘ ‘ In 2005, journalists and writers observed that the newspaper business was ‘dying.’ They quoted numerous reasons for this trend, from the ready availability of information on the Internet to the fact that newspapers aren’t essential in this age of 24-hour news networks and blogs. Because of this, fewer people read print editions because they don’t want information in a once-a-day package anymore. ‘ ‘ ‘ It’s obvious that things are going to change drastically for the news industry ‘mdash; they already have. The only question is what’ will be the fate of print journalism. We have no doubt that it will survive, but we’re not sure what form it will take. The validity of news that print journalism supplies is a valuable public resource and provides more than just news, but also a written record of history and culture that may become buried in the Internet. ‘ ‘ ‘ It’s clear that collaboration between print and online media is more important than it ever has been, and the only way for newspapers to survive in this new information era is to drastically expand their multimedia operations and make themselves indispensable again ‘mdash;’ rather than fallow as the heavy, outdated bundles of ink they’re rapidly becoming. ‘ ‘ ‘ The Christian Science Monitor isn’t the first newspaper to fall victim to the pressures of the Internet age, and unless other newspapers learn this lesson quickly, it certainly won’t be the last.