News Leaders of the Future: Hindsight is 20/20?
We’ve been talking a lot about the future of news on the Perfect Market blog. Sometimes the best source of information comes from the past (nota bene: the author was a history major and remains an unabashed history buff).
The Pew Research Center’s Project on Excellence in Journalism has recently released the findings of its survey “News Leaders and the Future,” polling executives from Radio, TV and newspapers for their outlook on journalism.
Though the survey was focused primarily on testing levels of optimism amongst newspaper and broadcast executives, a question about what the leaders would have done differently proved to be the most telling. Surprisingly, their answers reveal that when it comes to the crisis in the publishing industry, executive hindsight may still not be 20/20.
Both newspaper (36%) and broadcast (37%) executives wish they had “invested in new media, technology, or internet.” Thus the executives can agree on the obvious: it would have been nice if they had seen the explosion of new media coming. What about other things they might have done differently?
It’s interesting that while 30% of newspaper executives responded that they would have charged for content earlier, only 3% of broadcast executives chose this answer. This is the only category where there is such a wide disparity between the two media groups; every other option is differentiated by no more than 6%. Could it be that newspaper executives still believe people will pay for their content, while broadcast executives have come to grips with the fact that original content is only sustainable when supported by innovative advertising models? (Ahem.)
The Pew Center also reports that, “When it comes to the often-discussed option of pay walls for online content, for instance, only 10% say they are working on them, though that could change. Another 32% are considering them and just 11% have written off the idea. More than a third (35%) have not even considered them at all. Still, as they look ahead, only 15% of news executives believe pay walls will be a significant source of revenue in three years.”
The results of the survey suggest that there’s still a long way to go before new and traditional media leaders are on the same page in terms of what needs to happen in order to “save journalism.”
Only 9% of newspaper executives and 8% of broadcast executives believe that they should have worked to better understand their community, users and consumers.
Amy Gahran of the Knight Digital Media Center sums up the surprising results: “These answers could indicate that perhaps many of today’s news industry execs still don’t quite grasp what caused their companies to fall on hard times. This could be a problem as these organizations attempt to navigate the evolving news landscape.”
— Lee Glandorf
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