Newspapers ‘rising to challenge’

in News by admin — June 8, 2010 at 4:27 pm | 0 comments

Despite falling sales and gloomy headlines, the newspaper industry is not in complete decline, according to Rasmus Kleis Nielsen of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University.

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen from of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University (picture by Henrik Flor)

Speaking during a session on newspapers at the Journalism’s Next Top Model conference at the University of Westminster’s Regent Street campus, Nielsen acknowledged the increase in news consumption via the internet between 1998-2007 in the US, France and Finland. However, he claimed that newspapers will not become extinct and that “there is still time for companies to pursue their organisational strategies” to save themselves from decline.

He implied that more thorough journalism will make newspapers more worthy news sources, suggesting that “higher revenue does not necessarily lead to good journalism”.

However, another speaker at the Meeting the Challenge session, former BBC Worldwide executive Eric Guillaume, did not share Nielsen’s optimistic view of the future of print media, as you can see in the following video. Instead, he insisted that news producers need to find a way to integrate news products effectively into new media, and that the best way for new media to progress as news sources is “to learn about their audience”.

Guillaume offered little hope to newspaper journalists facing a seemingly unstoppable downward spiral: “We’ve heard of the decline of newspaper readership in the UK. For the world, I think it’s only a matter of time.”