In the last few months we have witnessed  a profound change in information media. It would appear that it has lost public acceptance and advertising has dropped off dramatically since  2008. It’s been said that 2008 was the worst year ever for the media.

James Warren of The Atlantic reported that over 30 newspapers and news agency representatives had a secret meeting in Chicago last week. They are concerned about the future of the information business and need to recover all the cash that they lost due to the crisis in the ad’  business, money that is now funelling into social news websites or other similar webs.  In order to do this they are thinking about whether to charge for all the content that they generate -  being on the net does not assure profitability.

This is one possible solution, at least for the States, but for this to be effective they need to do it all together. The problem is that this action would be against the monopoly comission’s policy and this could only be resolved if they agree not to interfere with this action, as is foreseen by the US Goverment.

The main problem for newspapers is the change in information channels and the way people access the news, right now we have plenty of sites where we can get information – not just the newspapers. We get information from our contacts on social networks, from the people we follow on twitter, from Google news or whichever other method is most comfortable for us – all of them for free, so, who is going to pay for something that you can get for free?

Frankly, I don’t see how they are going to solve this problem, but there are media giants working on news distribution  and improvements to website SEO systems. Maybe the  Financial Times is right when they say that what businesses need is more technology to improve information gathering in order to make it profitable.