Disappearing Newspapers: How to Save Journalism in the Information Age

Disappearing Newspapers: How to Save Journalism in the Information Age

For more than three decades, news papers have been losing readers at a slow but steady rate. At the root of this is the fact that new information technologies, especially the Internet and its fierce competition for the public's time, have led to the diversion of newspaper readers.

In The Vanishing Newspaper: How to Save Journalism in the Information Age, Philip Meyer offers a new model for looking at newspaper companies. By analyzing how traditional newspapers make their money and how advertisers make their decisions, he offers newspaper groups a model to help the newspaper industry get out of its rut -- the influence model: newspapers produce two kinds of influence, social influence that is not for sale, and commercial influence that is for sale, or influence that prompts consumers to make up their minds to buy. According to Meyer, journalists are not in the news business, or even the information business, but in the "influence business". The beauty of this model, he claims, is that it provides an economic rationale for journalistic excellence. Meyer analyzes and describes the factors that have made the newspaper industry work in the past, and explores ways to leverage social influence to increase business value through data on the impact of the quality of journalistic products on business success.

In the book, Meyer's analysis is incisive and lively, and his conversations with newspaper company presidents and industry analysts are fascinating and thorough. The ideas that Meyer lays out in The Vanishing Newspaper: How to Save Journalism in the Information Age are of great value to journalism teachers and students, as well as to those in the industry, and make for indispensable journalism reading.