MONTEREY, California — I’d like to believe that things can get better for Pinoy newspapers because we can move to the internet in ways that perhaps no US paper can. Here they have been overtaken by online rivals who have taken over much of the information dissemination duties. With internet penetration still relatively low in the Philippines, there is an opportunity to get into the action along with everyone else. According to Internet World Stats, only 16 percent of Pinoys use the internet; in contrast, 72.5 percent of the US population goes online. This means there are only about 14 million Pinoys online out of a population of about 88 million, compared with more than 220 million Americans out of a population of about 304 million.
So where US papers are facing a kind of dead end, Pinoy papers can find great opportunities if they go online immediately. With almost three-fourths of Americans using the internet, many of them are set in their ways and many websites and web personalities are already established. In the Philippines, the field is still fresh and full of possibilities, and there is no reason to think the internet will not, sooner or later, become the major source of information and entertainment for Filipinos. There is as yet no profitable model for news websites, but it will be found soon, and we had better be already present on the internet well before that happens.
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