Newspapers facing stiff challenge, says Horgan

THE CHALLENGES facing the newspaper industry are unique in their suddenness and their severity, Press Ombudsman Prof John Horgan has said. He added that the the most acute issue facing the print industry is its survival.

Newspapers have to contend with the global slowdown, which is leading to falling advertising revenue and circulation, and the presence of the internet, he warned. Though the number of visitors to newspaper websites is increasing year on year, newspaper managements are struggling to find a way of converting those online visits into cash.

Speaking to journalism students at the University of Limerick last night, Prof Horgan said the experience of the New York Times which had to borrow $250 million (€193 million) to service a $1 billion loan showed that “nobody is entirely safe” in the newspaper industry.

However, he predicted that journalism will survive, and even flourish, if it does not lose its nerve and “if it remembers that it occupies a unique position as an indispensable intermediary between the increasingly complex and globalised world in which we live, and its citizens in every society. It will remain indispensable only if it remains credible”.

He warned against journalists plagiarising from the internet and using it as a substitute to leaving the office and finding out about what is happening in the world.

“When margins are under pressure, when staffing is being cut, and when the information superhighway is available to everyone at the click of a mouse, journalists at all levels must ask themselves: am I adding anything here or am I just repackaging something that has already been engineered by someone else? And is this all that my audience deserves and is paying for?”

Prof Horgan was speaking at the opening of the University of Limerick’s new journalism student newsroom.

Prof Horgan also warned against sensationalist trial by media and invitations to moral panic in coverage by the media of crime and courts.

He said journalists should refrain from usurping the role of the Garda and the judiciary in dealing with criminals.

“It is important not to forget that we, the people, employ the gardaí to catch criminals, and judges to sentence them. If journalists don’t think that these institutions are doing their job properly, then criticism is in order. That is what a free press is for, and very important it is too.

“But there are a couple of reasons why journalism should stop short of operating on the basis of a belief that it could do a better job of either. Justice is, or should be, the currency of the courts and the gardaí. Synthetic anger, trials by media, and invitations to moral panic are no substitute.”

Such behaviour by journalists and news organisations leads to a “diet of fake outrage that begins by boosting circulation and ends by turning people off”, he added.