MONTEREY, California — Before coming to the US to participate in the International Journalism Exchange (IJE), my notion of American newspapers was they were powerful, rich, and very influential entities that more or less got their way with anything. In many ways that is still true, especially when one compares the situation with the Philippines, but I received a bit of a shock when we were told at the beginning of the IJE that things have changed dramatically over the past few months. The influence is still there, but the money has gone elsewhere and newspapers are hanging on for dear life. There have been layoffs in even the bigger newspapers like the Washington Post (which we visited last Tuesday, September 23), and one can imagine how much tougher things are for smaller papers. In many ways, what I am learning in this training is how US papers are surviving in these difficult times — and that’s very appropriate for the situation back home.
One of the things I’m interested in learning is how to use the internet to boost the printed edition of the Mirror, but as it turns out, the newspapers here are also struggling with this themselves. Revenues from websites have not been substantial yet, but publishers and editors know that their future is in the web and so they plunge right in. Newspapers know that it is the internet that is killing their business, with sites like craigslist.com taking over the classified ads and bloggers usurping the throne long held by reporters and columnists. Now, rather belatedly, they are jumping the bandwagon, and they are taking to the new medium like fish to a sandbox.
The Monterey County Herald (in California), where I am spending the attachment phase of the IJE, is testing the internet waters and is implementing a number of ideas that may or may not catch on. I sat in with Lisa Mitchell, who manages the paper’s website, and she showed me some of the stuff the paper has online, some of which can be implemented easily and others not without considerable time, effort, and money. But the tools are there, and in many ways it only takes a desire to actually jump into the bandwagon to get it done. The fear of many newspapers is that putting up a website is a one-way street to financial ruin since many companies are still unsure about advertising online, and that is a justified apprehension. But the papers here know that sooner or later a sound business model will be found for online newspapers, and so it makes sense to have a web presence now and be deemed a trailblazer than delay and be called a late adopter.
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