Greenslade: online media may have to focus less on advertising revenue and commerce

Posted by Alisa Zykova on August 28, 2008 at 1:22 PM

FollowTheMedia.com's Philip Stone suggests that it media outlets may benefit from holding back web content either by waiting until after it is published or broadcast in traditional media or making people pay for "the really 'good' stuff". In response, The Guardian's Roy Greenslade thinks that Stone has "fallen into the that trap of seeing journalism only in business terms", assuming that unless news get advertising revenue and make a profit, there is no "commercial sense" to diffuse them.

"The naysayers will say there is so much competition out there anyway so holding back copy from the web is futile, but remember it is newspapers that excel at local coverage and most others steal from that newspaper coverage, so if that coverage is no longer available so timely on the newspaper website then the competition won't have much of it either," says Stone.

Stone thinks that US publishers stick to print editions since they continue to be "profitable" even though profits are declining. Meanwhile, newspaper sites may be excellent news sources but they may not be effective advertising mediums.

Greenslade writes that both "professional" or "paid" and "amateur" or "unpaid" journalist have to be employed, pointing out that "proper" reporters (i.e. those who would dig up news that someone doesn't want to surface) don't need expenditure on the same scale as in the past.

"Though it's fair to say that newspapers are dying, what we really should be saying is that the traditional newspaper business model is dying," says Greenslade. "Ad-funded journalism in the digital world is going to be very different."

Source: The Guardian