BorderWest

Why We Need Bloggers and New West

By Rebecca Powell, 7-22-08

The Pew Research Center released ”The Changing Newsroom: Gains and Losses in Today’s Papers,” detailing the state of newspapers across the country.

A summary of the report reads:

The study, by journalist Tyler Marshall and the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, captures an industry in the grips of two powerful, but contradictory, forces. On one hand, financial pressures sap its strength and threaten its very survival. On the other, the rise of the web boosts its competitiveness, opens up innovative new forms of journalism, builds new bridges to readers and offers enormous potential for the future. Many editors believe the industry’s future is effectively a race between these two forces. Their challenge is to find a way to monetize the rapid growth of web readership before newsroom staff cuts so weaken newspapers that their competitive advantage disappears. In recent weeks—after this survey was completed—a new round of newsroom cutbacks, made against a backdrop of steadily deteriorating advertising revenues and rising production costs, intensifies the difficulty of the challenge

When I spoke with Heath Haussamen, a journalist who left a traditional newspaper for a blog, he reminisced that when he was in college, professors said the web would change journalism in the next ten to fifteen years.  We have seen rapid change in the last five. In ten to fifteen, the “paper” of the newspaper business may become very rare.

Still, the reports says 56% of the editors interviewed felt they were producing a better product than they were three years ago and thought that web technology may be the “saviour” of the industry.

Papers are shrinking, but people still want news, still want to read about their communities. Enter—New West.

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