"The Vanishing Newspaper - Saving Journalism in the Information Age" von Philip Meyer

For more than thirty years the newspaper industry has been losing readers at a slow but steady rate. News professionals are inclined to blame themselves, but the real culprit is technology and its competing demands on the public's time. The Internet is just the latest in a long series of new information technologies that have scattered the mass audience that newspapers once held. The trend toward smaller audiences seeking more efficient sources of more specialized information has been accelerated by this form of communication.

In The Vanishing Newspaper, Philip Meyer offers the newspaper industry a business model for preserving and stabilizing the social responsibility functions of the press in a way that could outlast technology-driven changes in media forms. This "influence model," as it is termed by Meyer, is based on the premise that a newspaper's main product is not news or information, but influence: societal influence, which is not for sale, and commercial influence, which is. Meyer's model explores how the former enhances the value of the latter.
Philip Meyer is Knight Chair and Professor of Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

(The Vanishing Newspaper - Saving Journalism in the Information Age erscheint November 2004, ISBN 0-8262-1568-8 )

Robin Sloan stellt denn auch die berechtige Frage:

But if technology is driving changes in the way people exert and receive influence, even Meyer's eleventh-hour business plan might not hold up. If newspapers are in the influence business, and influence is creeping away to the edges... what's left in the center? The crossword?
[Via: http://www.poynter.org ]