The 58th World Newspaper Congress, the world’s biggest annual print media gathering, organised by the World Association of Newspapers has heard from several speakers who have warned of the impeding threat blogs and other forms of new media will have on the newspaper marketplace.
The BBC puts it more politely “speakers cautioned against complacency, predicting that free papers, online news sites, and the spread of blogs and other non-mainstream news sources would put growing pressure on the readership of traditional newspapers.”
Interestingly, the conference also heard that established newspaper groups have to look at ways to start profiting from the new ways that audiences access their media, ie: through blogs, which can only mean a combination of two things: more newspapers setting up blogs, or more newspapers buying out existing blogs. Moral none the less: play ball with the blogosphere or newspapers will lose out.
