The future of news: Stop the presses!
Mark Thompson, chief executive of the New York Times, points to the benefits of being able provide its news content to a vast new audience. “We’re talking about an opportunity to distribute your content at no charge at all to well over 1bn people,” he says. “[Facebook] has a larger population than the People’s Republic of China.”
.. In the US, combined newspaper advertising revenues from print and digital sources tumbled from close to $50bn in 2005 to $20bn last year, according to the Pew Research Center. In that period, digital advertising revenues on newspaper websites increased from $2bn to just $3.5bn.
.. The New York Times has close to 1m digital-only subscriptions, for example, while the Wall Street Journal has amassed 724,000 paying digital readers.
.. “Journalism has always had an independence of production and distribution,” she says. “But we’re moving away from that for the first time.” Publishers are “becoming dependent on a power structure they should be reporting on”.