The Century of New Media

“Bigger online [audiences] means rising digital ad revenues, and hopefully means the online unit is profitable on its own – though many ‘pure play’ digital news organizations struggle with that presently,” says Jamie Sturgeon, a Global News business reporter.

Newspapers such as the Toronto Star are able to retain audiences through print and online with brand recognition and reputation that’s decades old. But for start-up digital media with a less established audience, it is increasingly difficult to attract and retain a substantial follows when information can be found virtually everywhere.

Where does this leave the state of journalism?

Well, in order to predict a future, one must turn to the past.

In 1824, William Lyon Mackenzie, a Scottish immigrant and journalist published The Colonial Advocate, one of Canada’s more provocative newspapers of the 1800sin York (now Toronto). Initially, Mackenzie sought out funding from wealthy officials he labeled the “Family Compact”, who controlled a large part of revenue in Upper Canada.

The Colonial Advocate unlike others at the time set itself apart from other newspapers in a multitude of ways. For one, it had been rejected by the “Compact” due to pledge to retaining on impartial stance in Upper Canadian affairs.

Secondly, since it had been rejected, the Advocate held no political allegiance or partisanship, and was thus free to publish freely. This meant complete creative control and freedom from government appointed announcements, services, or political agendas.

However, since it was not a government-controlled entity, it could not reap the financial benefits either. Mackenzie and the Advocate were forced to rely solely on subscribers. Since this defeated the purpose of Mackenzie creating the newspaper, and his letters to wealthy subscribers often went unheard, these same wealthy partisans eventually became subject to slander in his newspaper.

This undoubtedly affected production. Not only was the Advocate being sporadically published, it also affected the type of journalism printed.

Today this can translate to the types of media widely available on the Internet, versus mainstream media privately owned by media corporations like Shaw, or government-controlled like the CBC.

Gawker, DailyBeast and even the Huffington Post all provide their readers with the type of news readers want to see: entertainment, lifestyle, beauty, gadgets and blog posts. Though they may not receive government funds, they are free to publish as they please with less restriction or regulation.

And all good things must come to an end. Readers who continuously revisit sites are usually asked to pay for full access through digital subscriptions after a certain amount of time. Certain newspapers like the star offer access to certain sections of newspapers without it counting towards an online pay meter.

Even for big newspapers like the star, ad revenue still supersedes revenue generated from circulation.

“It’s difficult to foresee a day when the losses from print ad revenues and subscriptions can be fully offset by digital ad and subscription revenues,” says Global News reporter Jamie Sturgeon.

“Newspapers simply can’t aggregate the audiences and ad dollars they once could – a problems for all media to be frank,” he concludes.

Difficult or not, newspapers do take a loss in overall print revenues the longer they take to follow suite with cultural shifts. The New York Times knew this, switching over to the Internet roughly two years ago. It now rings in a whopping $150 million a year from over 700 000 paying subscribers.

Gawker put out an interesting article outlining the effects of introducing online paywalls. In it, writer Hamilton Nolan writes, “ If readers don’t want to pay for content online that they happily paid for in print, that content will eventually go away, due to the fact that it costs money to produce real journalism.”

“Paywalls will work for content that is worth paying for,” he continues.