The U.S. news business may be in freefall, but one group of journalists -- the reporters and editors who work online -- are relatively confident about the future of the industry, according to the results of a survey released yesterday by the Online News Association.
Of nearly 300 online journalists who took part in the survey, 82% said they were somewhat or very confident that a profitable online business model for news would be found. Approximately two-thirds predicted advertising would be "the most important form of revenue at [media] websites" three years from now.
There are good reasons to believe online advertising will come to the rescue of the news business. First, while newspapers and magazines have watched their subscribers evaporate, many of those same readers have migrated to the Web to get their news fixes. Most publications now have larger audiences on the Web than they ever did in print. Just look at the huge monthly traffic figures reported by the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, which draw tens of millions of unique vistors every month.
Second, the vendors of products and services who buy the bulk of print and television ads are also moving to the Web. The recession has caused some to pull back from online marketing efforts, yet online ad spending still rose more than 10% last year, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau.
Still, having lots of eyeballs looking at online content and vendors willing to pay to have their messages put in front of them is not enough to turn around the news industry. As News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch noted last month, the "infinite increase in inventory" driven by social networks and media sites undermines ad rates. For most media companies, online revenue is growing, but it's still far from enough to offset their losses elsewhere.
Indeed, about one-third of the online journalists polled in the ONA survey did not see online advertising as the most important source of revenue in the year 2012. The free-form answers reviewed by the Standard suggested some interesting alternatives, including content syndication, licensing of technology, paid video and photos, and "sale of data."
Another possibility, noted in one of the responses: "Renting out empty space in building and parking garage."
Photo: richardmasoner (Flickr/creative commons)
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