Media jobs disappearing

Norwegian tabloid VG has announced that it wants to downsize their staff by 70-90 employees. The move comes as VG's circulation is down by 10 percent as well as experiencing falling advertising revenues.

Norwegian media jobs are disappearing in their hundreds. Dagbladet announced job cuts several months ago, and Orkla Media, owner of several local newspapers, web sites and radio stations, are also considering staff cutbacks.

Statistics don't lie. Readers move from print to the web, and owners have to react. But for many papers, cutting back on staff also means sacrificing quality, which might escalate the falling circulation numbers. And while the web is becoming ever more popular and internet advertising is increasing, the print edition is still responsible for 80% of the papers' revenue. If circulation numbers keep falling, the companies will have to act. Readers might have to choose between paying for good content or receiving poor quality free content.

Publishing an online newspaper is a lot cheaper than its print sibling. No printing or distribution costs, and staff numbers can be a lot lower. But do we as consumers want news services that do no more than recycle each others' stories? Most "news" web sites today do this. The same story is published simultaneously on different sites, using the same news agencies as their source. If this is where we are headed, I fear that news coverage in the information age will be poor and of little real value. At least not if we stick with the notion of the media as society's watchdog.