Indeed, Jarvis believes “one of the biggest threats to the future of newspapers is not the internet, Craig’s List, or freesheets but, indeed, some editors themselves – those who have resisted change and missed so many of the opportunities technology provides to expand journalism.”

One of the main challenges in the evolution will be to let go of a traditional and well-respected medium, paper. “It is time to go the next step, to stop defining ourselves by our medium, paper, and to start defining ourselves by our service: journalism,” says Jarvis.

So Jarvis points towards the obvious, but essential, realization that newspapers now sell a professional service, accurate content, rather than a package (although they sell the package too).

In order to do so effectively, “we must train our journalists to think past paper,” he adds. But Jarvis is worried by the fact that 22% of editors still cling to traditional recipes such as hiring more journalists.

Zogby tended to have a more enthusiastic view of the findings. “Today, the gloom and doom predictions coming from the newspaper headlines are about the demise of the newspapers themselves,” he says. But the study revealed that “newspaper leaders are sanguine about the future of their own newspaper” and that “print editors see the internet and its new journalism components as the next wave of their own business and are preparing for this wave, instead of opting to fight it.”

Jarvis evokes a few examples of innovative newsrooms, which have successfully embraced the challenges of the digital era. Continuous news desks are one innovation: “A number of papers are now breaking out of the schedule of publication,” he says, citing the Washington Post, The Guardian and Gannett.

Editors “seem to be prepared for (and even welcome) the development of new technologies in news development and distribution,” comments John Zogby. And even Jeff Jarvis, who tends to be skeptical about news executives’ open-mindedness to innovation, says that “I now see signs of hope as editors embrace the imperative for change.” The question now, as Jarvis puts it, is just how innovative will newspapers and their editors be?

But perhaps the most important condition for a successful future is not out-of-control innovation. Rather it is the realization that a model, which was successful in the past, needs to be renovated. “It is past time to reexamine and reallocate our resources and to acknowledge that in many ways, the newspaper business is inefficient,” says Jarvis. “Print will not die, but print is not our future,” says Jarvis. Journalism is.

The first session of the 14th World Editors Forum, held in Cape Town, South Africa, from June 3 through 6, will be dedicated to the Newsroom Barometer. John Zogby, CEO of Zogby International, will introduce the Barometer’s main results and an exclusive panel of specialists will discuss and analyze the findings.

Stay tuned for next year’s barometer.

Read below the full analysis by John Zogby and commentary by Jeff Jarvis:


Not So Fast: Who Said Newspapers Are Dead? By John Zogby

Two burning debates dominated the headlines forty years ago. “Is God Dead?” screamed the cover of the newsweekly magazine, Time. A lengthy cover story followed featuring the likes of theologians, political radicals, and other opinion elites.
    At the same time, in their runaway rock hit, “Scarborough Fair”, Simon and Garfunkel immortalized the line that preoccupied the literati and other devotees of the haute couture in the mid- to late-sixties: “Is the theater really dead?”
    As it turned out, both debates turned out to be a tad premature. God is doing just fine, thank you. He even wins elections in the United States and is still fighting wars -- on both sides, I might add.
    No sooner did Simon and Garfunkel pose their famous question, than Andrew Lloyd Weber and Tim Rice made Jesus Christ a Superstar. How about that for a two-fer? And the theater has been drawing record crowds on Broadway and in cities worldwide.
    Today, the gloom and doom predictions coming from the newspaper headlines are about the demise of the newspapers themselves. Zogby International was commissioned by the World Editors Forum and Reuters to do a poll of 435 newspaper editors worldwide and the results are as clear as the New York Daily News headline when US President Gerald Ford refused to bail out New York City from its fiscal crisis in the mid-seventies: “Newspapers to Gloom and Doomers: Drop Dead”.
    Our global editors survey reveals that newspaper leaders are sanguine about the future of their own newspaper. Eighty-five percent told us that they were either “very” or “somewhat” optimistic, while only 15% said they were either “somewhat” or “not” optimistic. (Only 2.5% said they were “not optimistic at all”). This optimism stands even among the 62% of respondents who reported that their newspapers’ circulation has dropped or remained unchanged over the past 5 years. It also came from all regions and is significant in the face of new challenges to the medium from both the Internet and the “free print newspapers” that are being handed out in major metropolitan areas around the world. In fact, few of the editors surveyed considered the free prints newspapers to be a “threat” (29%) while one in three (34%) saw them as a “welcome addition” and 28% viewed free newspapers as a “negligible presence”
That a full third of editors “welcome” free newspapers in their market can perhaps be explained in part by the fact that many traditional publishers are launching their own free print newspapers.  Though it should be noted that Europe’s intensely competitive free newspaper landscape may also explain why there, there also resides a higher level of insecurity (42% of European editors viewed free newspapers as a threat).
    Even more dramatically, four in five editors (79%) felt that “online/new media journalism” is a “welcome addition” in their community. Of several choices to the respondents on how best “to invest in editorial quality (in their)… newsroom, the top choice was “train(ing) journalists in new media” (36%), followed by “recruit(ing) more journalists (23%) and “retrain(ing) staff in traditional journalism skills”. Clearly, print editors see the internet and its new journalism components as the next wave of their own business and are preparing for this wave, instead of opting to fight it. Almost half (48%) felt that the “majority of news (print and online) will be free in the future” anyway.  In the United States, the news business seems especially aware to this fact with 63% foreseeing most news as free.
Interesting to note is that despite the bullishness and acceptance surrounding online/new media, over one third of respondents (35%) believe that print newspapers will still be the primary way in which news is read in their communities in 10 years. This compares to 40% who believe that news will be primarily consumed online and 11% who cite mobile devices as the primary vehicle through which news will be delivered.
    So what will be the future of opinion and analysis pages over the next ten years? Two in three (66%) said these will “increase in importance and, likely because of this enhanced role explaining the meaning of the news stories instead of simply reporting them, 50% responded that the quality of journalism will “improve over the next ten years”. Only one in four (27%) saw journalism quality worsening.
        The editors polled worried less about threats of editorial independence coming from the public they serve and more from the business side of the newspapers. Over half either cited “pressure from advertisers” (27%) and “pressure from shareholders” (26%) as the “principal threat to your newspaper’s editorial independence”. Only 19% saw “political pressure” as the main problem. However, those more likely to be concerned about political pressure are those editors from Africa (43%), South America (29%), Russia (69%), and China (57%), and South Asia (35%). (N.B. Some of the subgroup sizes are very small but they are worth reporting because of the key difference between these regions and the West).
    In short, newspaper editorial leaders worldwide have good feelings about the future of their own papers and the industry as a whole and they seem to be prepared for (and even welcome) the development of new technologies in news development and distribution.

Are We Innovative Enough? By Jeff Jarvis

I’ll be blunt: One of the biggest threats to the future of newspapers is not the internet, Craig’s List, or freesheets but, indeed, some editors themselves – those who have resisted change and missed so many of the opportunities technology provides to expand journalism. But I now see signs of hope as editors embrace the imperative for change, which is reflected in the WEF-Reuters-Zogby Newsroom Barometer: 79.1 percent now say that online is a welcome addition to journalism and their communities; 73.6 percent see news-as-conversation as a positive development; and only 29 percent see freesheets as threats. Well, good. But, of course, the proof will be in how aggressively, imaginatively, and quickly these editors transform their organizations and journalism.

Consider first the opportunities of online. Oh, yes, newspapers are now putting their news on the internet; that has become the norm. But look at what more can be done:

A number of papers are now breaking out of the schedule of publication. Many have continuous news desks to serve the public online, anytime. Some  – including the Washington Post and London’s Telegraph – are now making constant news coverage the responsibility of print editors as well. The Guardian in London has begun putting stories that were destined for print online first, hours before publication. Gannett in the United States is exploding its newsrooms and ordering journalists to tell the world what they know when they know it. Bravo to all that.

But now it is time to go the next step, to stop defining ourselves by our medium, paper, and to start defining ourselves by our service: journalism. In the survey, only 35.3 percent believe print will be the most common way of reading news. (Note wide geographic disparity in that prediction: 13.0 in southern Asia, 14.3 in China, 24.2 percent in North America, against 35.3 in Western Europe, more than 40 percent in Africa and eastern Europe, and 64.8 percent in India.) In any case, print is declining in much of the world and other media are growing everywhere, so we must move past print to survive and succeed. In Sweden, the world’s oldest continuously published newspaper, Post- och Inrikes Tidningar, founded in 1645, went out of print in January and moved online. Guardian Editor-in-Chief Alan Rusbridger has said that the new Berliner presses his paper just installed, at a cost of 80 million pounds, are likely the last they will order.
In the survey, most editors are only “somewhat optimistic” about the future of newspapers. Print will not die, but print is not our future.

And so we must train our journalists to think past paper. Edward Roussel, head of digital for the Telegraph, speaks for more and more editors today when he says that he expects journalists to have at their command the full toolkit of media and to use whatever media are appropriate for a story and whatever media serve the public’s needs best. This is how we are training tomorrow’s journalists at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, where I head the interactive journalism program. This is what Gannett is expecting of its new newsrooms. So I see it as somewhat heartening that when asked how they would improve editorial quality, a plurality of editors, 36.3 percent, said they would train journalists in new media.

I was less encouraged by the answer of 22.6 percent of editors: They would improve quality by hiring more journalists. That has been our reflexive answer for so long and it is the spirit behind the actions of the last two editors of the Los Angeles Times, who sacrificed their positions in a fight to maintain the size of their newsrooms. I say it is past time to reexamine and reallocate our resources and to acknowledge that in many ways, the newspaper business is inefficient: We waste money on ego, on duplicating the reporting of others under our bylines. We waste yet more providing services, such as stock market tables, that are vestiges of our roles as one-size-fits-all providers of information in our communities.

We have to recognize that the economics of newspapers have changed irrevocably – especially in monopoly local markets – and so we must decide where to put our resources to best use. We must boil ourselves down to our essence. So what is that essence? In the case of local newspapers, I believe it is about becoming more local. In the case of national newspapers, I believe it is about providing stronger analysis (65.5 percent of survey respondents believe that “opinion and analysis pages” will increase in importance – though I would separate the two and say that opinion is hardly in short supply in this world of weblogs). And everyone must invest in the future: in technology and training.

So with those economic pressures upon us, doesn’t it inevitably mean that journalism must shrink? No, it does not. And that leads us to what I believe is the most important response in the survey: Almost three-quarters of editors see it as a positive that news is no longer a lecture but a conversation. But what does that mean? If this conversation entails merely providing the means to interact – or most often, to merely react to what we print – then that does not go far enough. Instead, I say, we must make the public our partner in gathering and sharing news. That is how we will expand the reach of journalism into our communities.

I, among many, used to call this “citizens’ journalism.” But I have recanted that, for I believe it is a mistake to define journalism by the person who does it, since anyone can perform an act of journalism. And I believe it is dangerous to certify journalists, for that gives someone the power to decertify them. Also, I have heard many journalists complain that they are citizens, too. So now I call this “networked journalism,” emphasizing the value of collaborative, professional/amateur efforts. Does this mean we hand over our notebooks to just anyone and give up the craft? Of course not.

But there are many projects exploring what we can do together: Gannett, once more, has made collaboration with the public a cornerstone of its new newsroom organization. At New York University, Jay Rosen is launching NewAssignment.net, which aims to test whether the public will contribute ideas, money, and reporting. Many papers are beginning to rely on members of the community to help them become more “hyperlocal.” Michael Maier, founder of net-only newspaper Netzeitung in Berlin, has left to start a new company built around Readers-Edition.de, where the people report and edit news. The BBC and the New York Times are enabling the public to remix their news.

All of that should lead us to see that instead of fretting over shrinking newspapers and newsrooms, we should be grateful that we are in a period of exciting change and great innovation. The question remains: Are we innovative enough?

For the full Newsroom Barometer results and commentary plus the complete, analytical guide to the monumental transformations taking place in the newspaper industry, please consult the print or PDF version of Trends in Newsrooms 2007 (http://www.trends-in-newsrooms.org/home.php), released 27th March 2007. From free papers to e-papers, citizen journalism to social media and integrated newsrooms to Internet aggregators, it has everything you need to know to direct your paper towards a multimedia future.

Read part 1 – Nobody has killed the newspaper
Read part 2 - How editors view emerging forms of journalism (free papers, citizen journalism, online journalism and more)
Read part 3 – How editors view their newspaper in 10 years
Read part 4 – Newsroom priorities, threats to editorial independence
Read part 5 – Who participated in the Newsroom Barometer?
Read part 6 – Newsroom Barometer: analysis by John Zogby and comment by Jeff Jarvis