longwood.edu
A recent "Newsroom Barometer" poll commissioned by the World Editors Forum and Reuters indicates that newspaper insiders are feeling pretty rosy about the survival of print these days. Zogby International polled 435 editors-in-chief, deputy editors and other senior news executives from around the world, finding that 85% of them are "very optimistic or somewhat optimistic" about the future of their papers. The full results can be found here. Among the more notable findings:
- Forty-percent of editors and news executives believe online will be the most common platform for news ten years into the future, while 35 percent believe in print's supremacy. One in ten say mobile devices will be the most common platform, while 7 percent cite e-paper. And two out of 10 respondents say it will be technologies that are still in the emerging stage.- Half the respondents believe that journalistic quality will improve over the next 10 years, versus one-quarter who think it will worsen.
- Eight in ten respondents view online and new media as a welcome addition. Those with high volume web traffic -- more than 200,000 unique visitors per day -- are more likely to view new media positively, but the majority of editors at newspapers with modest traffic or no web sites also viewed new media positively.
- Three in ten respondents view free newspapers as a threat to the market, while the majority take a more benign view -- 34 percent view them as a welcome addition, and 28 percent consider them negligible. Smaller newspapers are more likely to see free papers as a threat than larger newspapers, perhaps because larger newspapers have the resources to fight off free paper competition, as well as produce their own free papers.
- Respondents are almost evenly split over whether they think that the majority of news, both print and online, will be free in the future.
Such universally sunny predictions are surprising (to put it mildly) given the steady stream of reports prophesying the impending demise and/or obsolescence of print over the past few years, not to mention revelations like this one, which suggest that online media is already on pace to lap its newspaper counterpart in the near future. Still, hope does spring eternal - though a dose or two of denial usually helps it along.
