Local news leaders give input on industry in panel

“We are not dead yet.” 

A number of local journalists gathered for a panel discussion last night in the Granite State Room to discuss the future of journalism. 
   

Each panelist shared their thoughts and views about the route journalism will take in the next few years while the audience listened and asked questions. 
   

“Newspapers are dying, but news isn’t dying,” said John Christie, former publisher of Kennebec Journal. 

Christie argued that nothing is like feeling the actual paper, which is one thing the web can’t offer its consumers.  Websites and blogs are substitutes for newspapers, but the paper creates community.

John Tabor, publisher of the Portsmouth Herald, said that the strength of newspapers is letting people know what’s going on in the community such as funerals and weddings. 

“If we didn’t have local newspapers, people wouldn’t know about those things,” Tabor said.  “We should stop weeping and realize our strengths.”
   

According to the panelists, newspapers just have to reinvent themselves in order succeed.  Many consumers are reading news for free online, and the problem is encouraging readers to subscribe in order for newspapers to make a profit.  Since newspaper ad revenue has decreased, there is a freeze on jobs for reporters. 
   

“Ninety percent of households in New Hampshire have the Web,” said David Solomon, vice president of news for The Telegraph. 
   

Phil Kincade agreed with Solomon when he said that young people are not reading the newspapers, which is a problem since they are the upcoming generation.  The younger generation never read newspapers while growing up, but once they graduated from college and stated families, they wanted know what was going in the community.  Therefore, they picked up a paper, but today that is not happening. 
   

“We can lecture them on why it is important to read the newspapers till we are blue in the face,” Kincade said.  “But they are going to do what they want to do.”
     

“We have to find a way to please readers and have to be better marketers,” Tabor said.
Newsrooms want to hire young reporters because they can learn a lot from them, according to Solomon. 

The problem is that they don’t have money to take on more employees since they have been in the process of laying them off.

The profits newspapers are used to receiving over the years have been dropping tremendously, and the panelists encouraged the younger generation of reporters to be well rounded in the media. 

“The news room needs young people who are skilled in the media,” said Terry Williams, publisher of The Telegraph.  “Our generation is not familiar with social networking websites like Facebook, and finding ways to communicate is a big priority for newspapers.”

The discussion had students nervous about what the future holds for journalism and their career. 

“Since hiring is on a freeze, how will I get a job if they are not open?” said Greg Meighah, a journalism student. 

Meighhan said that it’s hard to prepare for what journalist needs if we don’t know where it is going.  The courses offered for journalism students such as Pre/Post 1800 are not exactly preparing him to receive a job as a reporter once he graduates.

“Standard English/Journalism major is not where we want to be,” Meighah said.  “We have a little over a year to figure it out.”

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2 comments

John Wayne Ferguson

Sat Nov 14 2009 21:55

I was in the audience on Thursday for this pretty interesting discussion.

The thing that annoyed me the most was the woman in the audience who stood up during the Q&A and said that the young journalists in the audience should let the old guys up on stage worry about the industry, while the young people should focus on connecting with people.

That was wrong.

The old guys up on stage didn't have solutions, they admitted to be irreversibly smitten by the print product. They are not innovating the industry, they are holding on as long as they can and hoping that someone else finds a way to survive. Young people need to define what it means to be a 21st century journalist.

The answer, I think, is that every newspaper needs to turn into a news organization. That means getting people that can write about the news, but that can also do audio and video reporting. It means embracing social networking as a distribution method, as a way for consumers to interact with the news, and as a way to create a social personality. It means trying things like database journalism, livecasting and hyperlocal news apps. It might mean combining a daily website with a weekly publication or becoming a NPO.

The solution isn't with the old guard that have run newsrooms for the past forty years. The radical change that is needed must come from the youngest generations of journalists, or else papers will continue to collapse and the fourth estate will never recover.

Also, I have no sympathy for the senior journalism major who complains about not being taught enough to get a job, yet he does not have one byline in the school paper. While not affiliated with the journalism program, TNH (and, to an extent, Main Street Magazine) is an important part of the education of UNH journalists, because it offers the chance for writers to interview, work on deadline and write real articles that are fairly widely distributed. That's not something that can be done in the classroom, and the student that expects that it is doing himself a disservice.

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Fri Nov 13 2009 00:57

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