The End of Journalism

There have always been reporters, but will there always be professionals? George Brock, for the Times Online, tries to answer that.

From the story...

...the upheavals will continue...The advertising income which grew and sustained the media systems of Europe and America in the second half of the twentieth century has shrunk and will reduce still further. Not all the newspapers and television channels that lived on that income will survive. At the same time, people feel they have less time to read newspapers; they felt this just as papers grew larger and larger on the advertising booms of the 1980s and 90s. Young people are not acquiring the newspaper-reading habit and are watching less news and current affairs on television.

Newspapers are in a double bind: with falling traditional income and little from new media, they can only hope that their digital income will improve. These pressures have not significantly reduced the number of newspaper titles yet, but they have hollowed out many newsrooms. Less money is available to be spent on ambitious journalism. Newspapers will not vanish, but there will be fewer of them and they will be increasingly the preferred medium of older people.