Newspaper Editors surprisingly optimistic about their future

According to a survey launched by the World Editors Forum and Reuters and concucted by  Zogby International, 85% of senior news executives see a rosy future for their newspaper.

An overwhelming number of respondents say they are very optimistic (24%) or somewhat  optimistic (61%) about the future of their newspaper. Even among newspapers whose circulation decreased over the past five years, 80% of respondents remain optimistic. It means that contrary to conventional wisdom and widespread doom-and-gloom predictions, senior news executives are overwhelmingly optimistic about the future of their newspaper.

Some highlights of the survey:

- Forty-percent of editors and news executives believe online will be the most common platform for news ten years into the future, while 35% believe in print’s supremacy. One in ten say mobile devices will be the most common platform, while 7% cite e-paper. And two out of 10 respondents say it will be technologies that are still in the emerging stage.
- Half the respondents believe that journalistic quality will improve over the next 10 years, versus one-quarter who think it will worsen.
- Eight in ten respondents view online and new media as a welcome addition. Those with high volume web traffic — more than 200,000 unique visitors per day — are more likely to view new media positively, but the majority of editors at newspapers with modest traffic or no web sites also viewed new media positively.
- Three in ten respondents view free newspapers as a threat to the market, while the majority take a more benign view – 34% view them as a welcome addition, and 28% consider them negligible. Smaller newspapers are more likely to see free papers as a threat than larger newspapers, perhaps because larger newspapers have the resources to fight off free paper competition, as well as produce their own free papers.
- Respondents are almost evenly split over whether they think that the majority of news, both print and online, will be free in the future.
- Three-quarters of respondents view the trends toward increased interactivity between news organisations and their readers as positive for quality journalism, while only 8% take the negative view.
-  Fifty-four percent of editors think shareholders and advertisers pose the principal threat in the future to editorial independence of newspapers.  Nineteen percent of respondents, mostly from the developing world, cite political pressure as the main threat.

Click here to watch the news clip on Reuters