Not Guilty: The Internet is not newspapers' murderer

Hickins' belief that fraudulent numbers are to blame is based on the idea that newspapers have burned bridges with advertisers by falsifying circulation figures to make them appear more attractive. Indeed, newspapers are slowly but surely refunding their clients for revenue lost on the basis of fudged numbers. However, it may prove difficult for advertisers to forgive publishers' dishonesty that resulted in the loss of millions of dollars.

The main culprit, however, according to Hickins, is the issue of salary inflation at online publications, caused by the fact that salaries "had to be adjusted for the stock options that artificially inflated the potential compensation packages offered by the dot-com start-ups." He points out that his salary shot up an extra $15,000 per annum after transferring to Conde Naste's online edition of the publication he was working for. And of course, he accepted the salary raise without any hesitation.

Hickins attests that a person's salary should be a true reflection of that person's value to the company. And as online advertising is currently not generating as much as print advertising, it does not make sense to pay online journalists more. Only star journalists who personally pull in readers deserve high salaries, Hickins believes.

However, throughout the industry there are a lot of journalists labouring away for well under what Hickins made at Conde Nast. Staff at local and regional newspapers, who also frequently write for online, tend to earn less that what Hickins made even prior to the digitalization of newspapers. A copy editor at the New York Times makes just under 100K/year, for example and scraping close to six-figures is double the average salary of $45,000.

So what should newspapers do? Lower salaries that might have been "inflated"? This would be an extremely difficult step to take, especially considering newspapers' need to attract high quality talent to produce news that will be able to fight off the vast amount of competition that exists on the web. Clearly employees should not be greedy, but it is possible that if salaries were directly equated with the employee's actual value to the company, particularly in this current financial climate, salaries might be excessively low.

It would be equally easy to argue that is it the advertising slowdown which is killing newspapers. For years, advertisers have been happy to fill in the gaping holes of profit where paper sales fell short in exchange for a whopping numbers of eyeballs to glance at their product or service offering. Now, advertising revenue is not enough. Regardless of what is to blame for newspapers' problems or not, there is no doubt that netting more capital online should be a key priority for newspapers today as they seek to find ways to cover the costs of news gathering.