Hong Kong, April 27 (CNA) Media members taking part in an international conference Tuesday discussed possible new models for the media business, which is facing enormous challenges in the Internet age.
Items such as "free vs. subscription, " the fierce competition for readership and advertising dollars and the "rethinking of the media" were discussed by participants in a debate titled "Sustainable Media Models in the Internet Age" on the second day of the 2010 International Media Conference, organized by the U.S. Congress-funded East-West Center.
Joshua Benton, Director of Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, noted that it is difficult for traditional media to be profitable in an age in which fewer people read print news.
Since 2006, one-third of newsroom jobs in the U.S. have been cut, he said.
While the average time spent on a news website per user averages between 2-8 minutes per month, Benton said, the same stats for the social website Facebook is 7 hours per month.
According to Benton, most news organizations lack technical expertise and their newsrooms tend to insist on sticking with traditions, which hampers much-needed adjustment.
Benton said that a good model for increasing revenues would be to publish newspapers only two or three times per week, charging NT$315 (US$10) per paper. That way, he said, readers would be interested in news content because there would be increasing segregation between printed material and web content.
Thomas Crampton, a former New York Times journalist, said the emergence of social media such as blogs, and services such as Facebook and Twitter, have caused a structural impact, as the barrier of entry has become extremely low, while some advertisers no longer deal with the print media at all.
Charging readers does not sound like a good idea because "a lot of people will be happy with the free alternatives, " he said.
In terms of the negative impact suffered by the emergence of the Internet, the media business is a lot like the music industry, Crampton went on.
He advised the media to pay attention to the three pillars of "print, online and in-person, " which means media companies should provide their news stories online and in print, and should probably organize real-life events to create closer bonds and better communication with readers.
Reginald Chua, editor-in-chief of the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post, said the media suffers because the revenue it receives from advertisements and subscriptions and the costs of news production do not match.
Chua urged the media to think hard about how to generate revenue, how to change its way of telling stories, how the newsroom can help with reporting and how to restructure the newsroom, which according to him has not changed much since the 1950s. (By Chris Wang) ENDITEM/J