The future of the international news industry

Business 22 Nov 10 The internet is often held up as the main reason for declining newspaper sales and dwindling revenues. But an academic assessment of the news industry conducted in seven different countries shows that, contrary to popular belief, in many cases the internet is not the main challenge facing the business of journalism. A new book, commissioned by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ) at the University of Oxford, finds that even within otherwise comparable, developed democracies with similarly high levels of internet use, there are massive differences in how the newspaper industry has fared in recent years. It explores a range of themes including: the differences in national media systems; the history of the financing of general news; technological developments changing the face of news businesses; and case studies of how media systems are changing in Germany, Finland, France, the UK, the United States, Brazil and India. It shows that the latest downturns in the industry often can be traced to a combination of a cyclical downturn in advertising revenues—driven by the global recession —and the fragile inherited business models common in some countries that rely more on advertising than on sales. For example, advertising revenues were down 10.4 per cent from 2007 to 2008 in the UK, and 6.3 per cent from 2007 to 2008 in the US. Countries like the US, Germany, and Finland all have about the same proportion of internet users.