Coronavirus precipitates information industry crisis

Audio 4:17

By: Dominique Baillard Follow

The print media is one of the industries devastated by the coronavirus pandemic. Tens of thousands of jobs have been lost and hundreds of titles are threatened with extinction around the world.

Publicity

The public has never been more hungry for information, as witnessed by the spectacular increase in newsroom internet audiences, and newspapers have never suffered so much economically. This is the great paradox of this major crisis that this industry is currently going through. Because readers only pay part of what they consume by buying a newspaper at the kiosk, paying online or subscribing. Advertising is generally an essential source of income, on average it is a third of the revenue of the French press. However, with the shutdown of the economy, advertising collapsed, on average by 50% for France. Finally, some newspapers live partly on the events they create, conferences for example, or that they cover, such as sporting events. Obviously containment has condemned this windfall. That is whyThe Team , the major French sports daily, is today in very poor shape, the management is proposing salary cuts to ensure the continuity of the title.

Many newsrooms are condemned?

As of April 1, sixty Australian newspapers are no longer printed. At the end of the month there will be a hundred in this case. A third of them will disappear, the rest will remain available online. They are all part of the Newscorp group of magnate Ruppert Murdoch. It is the country where the extinction of the press is the most spectacular.

Elsewhere, headlines already in bad shape before the crisis have been shut down, but most are still resisting the erosion of advertising revenue. This phenomenon started several decades ago. It was noticeable from the 1970s in the United States. TV has taken a growing share of this income and the internet has done the rest, the web giants, Google and Facebook siphon almost all the resource. The crisis generated by the coronavirus has only accelerated the movement.

New 100% digital titles such as Buzzfeed or Vice Media also suffer from this unfair competition and they have been hit hard by the sudden drying up of the advertising market which has taken away the last crumbs of the cake. To survive, they part with some of their staff and must develop a new economic model. The solution also involves negotiation with GAFA. So that they remunerate at fair price the contents which they resume free of charge. As some countries like Australia are now forcing.

Some titles have weathered this crisis rather well

The New York Times , the prestigious daily newspaper on the east coast of the United States, has gained half a million new subscribers. The titles which chose long before the pandemic to charge for information via the subscription to the paper edition, and more often online, are those which have best resisted this double constraint: to provide always more information with always less advertising resources. 60% of the New York Times ' revenues come from subscriptions. The Wall Street Journal , the financial daily of the United States, is also going through this crisis without too much trouble. These newspapers are now able to recruit new journalists.

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