Assignment 3-1: Journalism Consolidation

The recent trend when talking about journalism seems to be consolidation. I believe this is primarily due to the internet and how it offers people all over the world free news. It is hard for news companies to compete with internet journalism and some companies are forced into considering consolidation. Consolidation is such a scary word when talking about any subject. Most importantly it represents the possibility of people losing jobs and few companies/entities getting stronger and more powerful.

I would say, overall, journalism consolidation is a bad idea because over time it will degrade the quality of reporting and investigative journalism. For example, if in the next 20 years newspaper companies all across the company consolidate to where there are only 4 companies left, the remaining companies will have a basic monopoly in their area of coverage. There would be no other viewpoints to any story and whatever one of these monopolistic companies printed would be only thing people in this region would read about.

An article on the huffington post’s website (huffingtonpost.com) talks about journalism consolidation and why it is a bad idea. The article is title, “Consolidation is not Cure for Journalism Crisis,” and is written by Craig Aaron. Aaron points out how large media companies have been “swallowing” local media outlets for the past decade. 5,000 journalists lost their jobs last year and over the past decade 16 percent of the industry has been terminated.

The article also covers a financial topic that I was not aware of. When buying up many of the smaller news companies, the large companies go into extreme debt in order to consolidate. Even though the large companies still take in approximately 20 percent profit, they are drowning in debt. The only way to fix this debt trouble is to cut down on operating costs also known as journalists.

I feel the only people who win when consolidating news companies are the executive officers of the large media companies who can sometimes turn a quick profit. Everyone else gets hurt by the fact that thousands journalism jobs are being cut and that the quality of reporting is being decreased.

The article referenced above can be found at:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/craig-aaron/consolidation-is-no-cure_b_180356.html