Newspaper Public Attitudes - 2006 Annual Report

So what in the end is the fairest interpretation of the tumult of 2005?

An optimistic reading is that the newspaper industry is in a multi-year transition in which news staff is being reorganized and retrained to produce on new platforms. In 2005 we saw the evidence of this with buyouts of older employees and investment in online and niche operations, while managers tried to stabilize the financial problems on the print side.

A more pessimistic reading is that this may be a repeat of the scenario a decade ago when existing or shrinking staffs were asked to pick up additional production work that had migrated from the composing room to the newsroom.

When more definitive staffing numbers appear, the key question to watch is whether they signal genuine losses that will undermine the industry’s ability to make the transition to journalism’s next era.

If this is an orderly transition to a brave new multiplatform way of dong things at newspapers, it is going to take a lot longer than a year or two. As the discussion of economics and circulation earlier in the report makes clear, the industry has problems with its fundamentals, and investors have soured on newspaper stocks. One likely resolution of the Knight Ridder auction is that the company would go to a bidder who would make much deeper cuts — particularly to the news core — as an avenue to improving profit margins.

So it remains uncertain whether 2005 was the beginning of the future for the medium or a marker of continued decline. It remains the case that if newspapers do lose their edge in reporting the news in a well-organized, aggressive, public-spirited way, there is little evidence to date that blogs, citizen journalism or the big online players will fill the void.