The journalism world is still arguing between to-charge-or-not-to-charge for both their online and off-line news content. Advertisers have always been the ones to cover for the production costs of news publications. Can newspaper publications which had spent years of giving away their news content for free starts charging for it now? In my opinion seeing this issue from a Singaporean perspective, this is not going to work base on the very typical fact that the word 'FREE' is Singaporeans' favourite 4-lettered F-word! Also, currently we have free newspaper for the public at the SMRT stations (Singapore Mass Rapid Transit), which are 'Today' and 'MyPaper'. Besides, they can even get tons of related news online for free on the Internet as well. Therefore, I do not think so one will want to pay for news/information which they have been getting for free all these while.
Other questions for us to think about will be: Are there enough people whom do regard these news to be of value that they would pay for? Even if so, for how long and how much will these people willing to pay for their newspapers? I think the main concern with regards to the above questions is young generations are growing up with the huge influences of digital technologies. This gradually leads them to not having the concept of newspapers as a source of information since these information can be retrieve from the Internet for free. The explosion of cyberspace of the Internet will very likely to cause the omission for both off-line and online advertising prices, therefore, leads to the decline demands for traditional journalism. Hence, it does not matter if the news content should be free but what matters is will people pay for it. Looking this issue from the economic perspective, the Internet will continue to pull audience and advertisers away from traditional news media outlets, even Television and Radio industries as well. The instant connectivity nature of the Internet is putting increasing financial and social pressure on the processes of news productions of the traditional newspaper publications. As a result, besides just reporting on papers, more and more reporters or journalists working at the newspaper publications will have to do double, or even triple amount of duties. They too, need to do photographing, online bloggings and twitter updates every day on the social networking sites as well.
As a whole, I think in the current advertising-based system, it makes survival very difficult for print publications that solely depend from sales alone. Also, even if such publications survive, they will not be receiving enough media coverages and attentions from the public. The main reason is advertisings adverts do attract public's attention at most of the time! For example, the food and breverages promotion advertisements from NTUC (National Trades Union Congress), and mobile phones advertisments from Singtel. I feel that advertising, just like media ownership, acts as a news filter and affects the types of news aditorials to be publish on the newspapers since the threat of withdrawal of advertisings do affect editorial content. Thus, I feel advertisers should pay for journalism more than the consumers. Also, with regards to consumers should pay for online news content, newspaper industries should have started the policy way much earlier rather than now.
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