Employment Crossing

Finding new ways to attract advertisers will be essential to generating the income necessary to keep quality journalism alive, leading news executives said at a National Press Club forum.

 

"The business model is clearly broken," said Laura Hollingsworth, publisher of the Des Moines Register, part of Gannett which announced this week another 10 percent cut in personnel.

Supporting quality reporting and investigative projects is the essential piece of what the company is doing, she said, but it is only one piece.

 

She said that advertising is not following news to the Internet. Advertisers want to reach people where they are active, through information that connects to their lifestyles, she said. But the company cannot give up its core responsibility to civic engagement and watchdog journalism.

 

Hollingsworth was speaking at one of the National Press Club's forums on "The First Amendment, Freedom of the Press and the Future of Journalism" the Club is holding around the country to mark its 100th anniversary.

 

Michael Gartner, former president of NBC News as well as a Pulitzer Prize-winning print editor, publisher and columnist, said the newspaper industry should take a lesson from what happened to television news when cable and satellite television challenged the three major networks.

 

"I lived through all of this 25 years ago at NBC," he said. "It was the same dire threat that these folks are facing now. You lost exclusivity, you lost your immediacy, and you lost a big chunk of your audience and a big chunk of your revenue."

 

Television networks fought back by embracing cable television, he said. ABC has ESPN, and NBC has MSNBC and CNBC. Television networks found ways to cooperate with each other on routine news, to free up more money for competitive journalism.

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