The Hindu : Front Page : Newspapers must find a new economic model: Alan Rusbridger

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Jan 11, 2006

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Newspapers must find a new economic model: Alan Rusbridger

Diplomatic Correspondent

Only this will sustain the print media, given the erosion of their financial underpinnings, saysThe GuardianEditor Alan Rusbridger

NEW DELHI: Newspapers in the developed world have to find an economic model that will sustain what they do given the gradual erosion of their financial underpinnings, Editor of The Guardian Alan Rusbridger said at a public lecture organised by The Hindu on Tuesday evening.

Mr. Rusbridger, who spoke on the theme "Do newspapers have a future?," said the methods of delivery, deadlines and the medium itself — the balance between words, moving pictures, audio and so on — all that was going to change.

Speaking to a packed audience at the Teen Murti House auditorium, Mr. Rusbridger compared newspapers to second-hand bookshops. He pointed out that it was much easier to trace and buy books through the Internet.

Something similar, he argued, was happening to newspapers in the developed world, with more and more people reading online. Newspaper circulations and revenues were falling as a result.

Advertisers, he pointed out, had begun to complain on account of shrinking circulation. "So, like the second-hand bookseller, we have to think about changing our business model ... "

Mr. Rusbridger referred to a successful website created by Craig Newmark, a San Francisco-based web enthusiast. Mr. Newmark, who started a kind of an electronic notice board in the early 1990s, had now expanded it to a forum to sell and buy things — with the vast majority of advertisements being free, to both buyer and seller.

Mr. Newmark's business model was so successful that he was operating in 190 cities, attracting three billion page impressions a month from 10 million unique users and carrying six million advertisements at one time. Craigslist, which had no editorial content, had even extended its operations to New Delhi and Chennai.

Mr. Rusbridger felt that readers were no longer content to be passive receivers of news. Many of them were more interested in being part of a forum or discussion than being recipients of other people's opinions.

Looking at mass circulation titles in Britain, one could sense a failure of nerve, he said. "If people are turning off serious news, then we won't give them serious news. On many days they have effectively stopped presenting themselves as a newspaper at all," The Guardian Editor said referring to the Sun tabloid as a case in point.

In the end, people wanted reliable information. Trust, he remarked, was everything. "The skills we have as journalists — the ability to gather, to verify, to sort, to investigate, to challenge, to aggregate — will always be in demand in any society. What we do will always be important ... no changes in technology can change that."

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