These are struggling times for Journalism. Newspapers are going out of business as the advertising revenues are falling. This is an important point for the Journalism industry. It is our duty to find a sustainable system for Journalism to survive. In this essay, I would like to suggest some of the ideas to create a sustainable future for Journalism.
Bail Out
Some people believe that there should be a Govt. bail out for newspaper industry. President Obama also sounded it out earlier this year albeit jokingly. Some people are really fearful of this proposal to save the newspaper industry, because newspapers might become propaganda machines for the Government. Americans would never accept this as we live in society, where freedom of the press is respected. These are also genuine concerns and we must not sacrifice our values to save the Journalism industry.
Citizen Journalism
Every tom, dick and harry has a blog now and these blogs are very inexpensive to setup. One of my friend Paul Tomkins setup his subscription based blog last year. Tomkins have written six fairly successful books in the last seven years. He writes a weekly article for official Liverpool Football Club website as well. His blog has been fairly successful. Most blogs show the opinion of only one individual. I would like to see more collaboration with guest journalists also posting on a blog. I would also like to see group blogs about different topics with each individual covering the stories about certain topics.
Technology is a Friend
I think the journalism industry needs to adopt with the times just like any other industry. Current and future journalists must adopt to modern technology. They should be able to make picture slide shows, edit videos and write the articles. In the future, we will not have paper copies of newspapers and all the content will be online. I think multiple newspapers should collaborate and offer a couple of newspapers for one subscription fee. They should also try to make alliances with Internet giants like Google to make the web based newspaper business profitable. Google may become the middle man in the news business.
Opportunity
I firmly believe that the journalism industry will never die. The availability of news is important for any society in the world. The journalism industry is only going through a face change. In the future, we will have an environment that is friendly to journalism as most of the papers will be available online and there will no paper editions. It will save trees and decrease carbon–DI–oxide in the atmosphere. We will also see more collaboration in the news business between professional,amateur and everyday citizen journalists. We will have well-rounded journalists with expertise in multiple skills that are needed for the new newspaper business.
