http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00yzjky/Newsnight_22_02_2011/ (This is only available for another five days on BBC iPlayer).
Broadcast on BBC Two, 10:30PM Tue, 22 Feb 2011.
While watching Newsnight on the BBC the other night I happened upon this debate about the future of newspapers. It was a really interesting discussion with some very big movers and shakers of British media that included, Lionel Barber (Editor of The Financial Times), Mark Thompson (BBC’s Director General), Alan Rusbridger (Editor of The Guardian), Peter Barron (Director of External Affairs at Google) and was hosted by Jeremy Paxman. The piece starts at about 16 mins and the discussion starts at 21.20 mins.
Alan Rusbridger makes the point that the revenue from The Gaurdian’s digital output is about one third of the money that they can make from printed advertising, suggesting that newspapers will still be around for the foreseeable future, and really as long as the publishers can continue to hold onto them. The discussion about how to make money from their content was interesting as there seems to be a few models on how to approach this but as of now, possibly no definitive model. The Financial Times charges a subscription for their content, which seems more viable for them as they are delivering a very specific product to their readers, where as The Guardian’s content online is free and their revenue comes directly from advertising on their site. In direct contrast to these approaches, the BBC’s online content is completely free and their website has no adverts.
The newspapers are essentially brands that have been built up mainly due to quality content and trusted reporting. This seems to be the future of the newspaper industry, as now they are being read online worldwide, which allows them much greater reach and influence. The possible pitfall for these brands in the future is that they may rely on “citizan journalists” (the kind we recently saw in Cairo) more and more because this kind of reporting is much cheaper than having foreign correspondents in every country around the globe. It is then debatable whether the news being portrayed is objective as this has mostly been the job of a reporter in the past.
It seems that going forward newspapers are going to have to solidify their brands with what made them the trusted purveyors of the news in the first place, quality journalism. This is what will bring traffic to their websites, and lets be honest, the news industry will eventually go totally digital. In a the program linked above, one of the most obvious points was that most of the people still getting newspapers delivered in the morning across Britain are from the older generation. Most likely set in their ways, and less likely to have the latest tablet on the market.
Andy Mac Manus
LCC MAGD GROUP V 
Just one point I forgot to make. The BBC can obviously afford to have no outside advertising on their website because it is payed for by the television license payers. This possibly gives them an advantage over their online digital competitors. Although the BBC has never published a newspaper, with the advent of the total digitization of the newspaper happening right now, the BBC is now a much more direct competitor than it once was to the newspaper industry.