Hello again. There are a handful of hard facts which explain without the need of further explanations the process we've rather dramatically labeled the death of newspapers. Let's just start saying that in terms of employees, the industry has halved its size in 15 years in almost all countries. In terms of advertising, a North American study found out in 2012 that revenues that year were below those registered in 1950, 62 years before. By that time, Internet and the financial crisis were almost destroying the newspaper business model or so we thought, expelling tens of thousands of professionals, forcing the closure of hundreds of local outlets or thousands, and thus severely weakening journalism's role as democracy's watchdog. The media tycoon Rupert Murdoch declared famously that we are not in the business of printing words on dead trees, thus embracing the digital revolution. But the problem, as we know now, was and is much deeper than a mere change in the format we consume news. The optimism about digital media and the democratization of journalism through technology, about having access to more news and more journalism than any previous generation has had, has been watered down by this absence of a profitable business model for common media and is damaging effect on content quality, editorial independence, and prioritization. In recent years, the New York Times, mainly through subscription models, or the Washington Post after the intervention of Jeff Bezos who bought the newspaper in 2013, have regained financial independence and therefore editorial leadership. The same can be said about high-quality financial publications as the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times, although they had also to restructure the whole business. But what about less powerful outlets, local newspapers, independent radio or TV stations? Digital media struggled with the need for clicks and are constrained by this lack of revenue to consolidate their editorial liberty. Never corporation self founded easier to protect their interests by reaching agreements with newspapers to publish bounded content in an indirect way of funding these media enterprises, but also subtly protecting themselves from dangerous headlines. Journalists earn less than before, and this is a state of need which compromises their ambition and their objectivity. Remember, as someone said, a badly paid journalist is a public danger. So, one issue therefore is accessing quality journalism in this mass of content. But another one, a broader problem, it's simply that the amount of information and content is unmanageable by our brains. How can we filter the flow of information and make some sense of the world? How do we share a common story line about events? One could even ask himself, "Do we know more or less about the world than 20 years ago?" In an ecosystem full of fake news, clickbaits, and noise, of deception, many people have already given up completely on physical newspapers, and newsstand sales are plummeting without hope. On the other hand, sites with explosive growth in traffic but without any emotional or intellectual connections with users lose their value rather quickly. You can remember, for instance, Mashable, which was valued in March 2016 at approximately $250 million and was sold two years later for less than $50 million. The role of the press as the last defense of democracy is evidently weakening. But that is another story, although a very important one. For the purposes of this course, let's go back to content and continue analyzing what you can learn from good journalism in order to promote your brand.
