Adapt or die? Definitely adapt. [Alice]

Last semester, I took a course and the instructor spent a lot of time criticizing how terrible it is that readers are not paying for news, citizen journalists producing stories without in-depth thoughts, or less people now appreciate hard-copy version of newspaper. The list can go on and on and on. Believe or not, sitting there listening to this kind of preaches is like a nightmare. As a future journalist and a kid grew up in digital era, I think it’s hard for me to say how much journalists deserve being paid. I’d never want to jump into a low-pay occupation. However, I know that I wouldn’t spend even only 75 cents on a newspaper everyday when I can read it online for free.

Do journalists deserve low pay? I guess no. But the problem now is nobody is willing to pay for intangible information. We’ve been so used to retrieving information for free. If some news organization, say NY times, decided to charge users online, we switch to other newspapers. I have no idea whether journalists, or their work, deserve low pay. But I’m sure that as long as there is free online information with acceptable quality, nobody will pay.

To put what we learned in economics here, I’ll say the demand curve is extremely sharp. No matter how the supply curves look like, the price will remain low. The chief editor of Texas Monthly once came to our class and he said, “The business is gone, and it will never come back.” (This is the direct quote.) I guess that’s the situation we’re facing. We can only adapt or die, or waste our time trying to “teach” audience that they should pay us.

This is actually the reason I became interested in marketing and economics of news media. Before I came here, I was so anti-business. I didn’t even finish my two-semester economic class. Now I think marketing and economics are the only solution for newspaper. News media is losing ground. Old people can complain and stay in nostalgically “oh-the-good-old-days” mourns. Young people, like me, can’t. It is us formed the anti-fee generation so we should be able to find out how news industry will be tomorrow. Well, I might sound silly or naïve, but I guess I’m young enough to be silly.