by SERGE HALIMI
Will print media be dead by 2033? Jeff Bezos said last year that it would; yet he has just bought the Washington Post. He owns Amazon, and 1% of his fortune was enough to buy a newspaper that 20 years ago was worth 10 times as much as he paid for it, so he can afford a few impulse purchases. Buying the paper that broke the Watergate story cost him only a little more than building his millennium clock, which should still be keeping time in 10,000 years.
Newspapers are not selling well, and right now they’re going cheap. In five years, circulation has fallen by 13% in North America, 24.8% in western Europe and 27.4% in eastern Europe (1). Ad revenue is being lost to the net, and the market value of papers that depended on it has collapsed. In the US, it has fallen by 90% in 20 years, not counting inflation (2).
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We believe there is no such thing as free news (9). For that reason, most articles in the French edition can be read online only after six months, for a limited period of two years, and then only because the cost of the articles and of putting them online is covered by income from readers, and from gifts to the parent edition from readers anxious to guarantee our independence. (Donations currently exceed all our ad revenue and make an important overall contribution. Last year 2,075 of you gave €177,500 to the French edition — 20% more than in 2011 — allowing us to complete a number of development plans.)
The debate over going online and “giving” news away has contradictions. Often it’s those who complain that life is precarious for journalists, writers, photographers and artists who then demand that everything should be free, immediately, on the net, to promote ideas and culture. But paying journalists more to write articles that are then given away doesn’t add up. Should journalism be charity work for a privileged few who already have another job? Should reporters slaves to a business model based on ads, and on algorithms linked to Facebook, Amazon and Google?
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