Robert McChesney and John Nichols recently wrote about the current downfall of newspapers in “Finding ways to breathe new life into journalism.”
At one point, the two suggested, “In a nutshell, media corporations, after running journalism into the ground, have determined that news gathering and reporting are not profit-making propositions. So they're jumping ship.”
Where are they "jumping ship" to?
Incidentally, McChesney and Nichols give bloggers and Internet news reporters who engage in muckraking and real news reporting reason to worry about companies or businesses who might want to exploit the Internet for profit now that they have run print journalism into the ground.
Of course, Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal readers have money to pay for news stories on the web. Who reads the Wall Street Journal?
More importantly, McChesney and Nichols claim “no one has a business model to sustain digital journalism beyond a small number of self-supporting services.”
Continuing:
The attempts of newspapers to shift operations online have been commercial failures, as they trade old-media dollars for new-media pennies. Wikipedia and other collaborative efforts on the Web can help democratize our media and politics. But they do not replace skilled journalists and investigative reporting. Indeed, the Internet cannot achieve its revolutionary potential as a citizens' forum without such journalism.
Murdoch may be able to further develop and sustain a corporate model to sell corporate news with the help of his corporate news services for corporate people, but can an Internet news site really sustain itself and do what the press was intended to do when our nation was founded?
Can it continue to nurture an informed citizenry?
This isn't the first time Murdoch has advocated that news organizations charge for news. On, April 3, 2009, Murdoch said, "People reading news for free on the Web, that's got to change."
At The Cable Show, an annual cable television industry event, he made his case for charging for news by explaining that "online advertising, which most U.S. publishers hope will offset ad revenue declines at their print divisions, will not cover their cost."
Murdoch pointed out that the New York Times has had problems. Really, all sites from the smallest financed blogs to big well-known newspapers have struggled to use the Internet in a way that sustains operations.
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