Who Will Pay for Journalism?

This week the topic was all about who will pay for journalism, with the increase of pay TV, podcasting, the internet and time-shift technology cutting back on revinue gained from advertising in the traditional forms of the media. According to Roy Greenslade at the Future of Journalism summit (2008)

“Popular newspapers, the mass newspapers, are dying and will die. They have no future whatsoever."

This statement demenstrates the effects new technology is having on the media industry and journalists as a result.

This question of payment for journalism was also brought up at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) convention that suggested that a solution would be to stop journalism altogether:

"Here, I believe, is the ultimate ethical question: If the American public does not want to pay for journalism -- in other words, doesn't find value in what we as journalists do -- should we simply stop doing it?"

While I believe that the new technologies including free online news and time-shift technology is affecting revinue to the more traditional media forms, I don't think that the public has ever really paid for journalism in the first place, as advertisers have always picked up the majority of the costs while the public pay a small cover price, so maybe it is time to actually start asking them to pay for it. There is argument that the public will not pay for what they can get for free, even if what they pay for will be more professional, but the state of the current economy has to be taken into account, and perhaps when (if?) this improves then the public will be more willing to pay for news.