Can advertising work in the online world?

Yesterday, an article entitled "Why newspapers are like department stores" ran on Salon.com, the gist of which was that newspapers, like department stores, are outmoded business models that need to change in order to survive in an increasingly online world. After attending the first annual Schuneman Symposium, the questions facing journalism seem to be larger than how is the very nature of the profession changing? Instead, the overriding issue seems to be can journalism survive these changes and still make money?

Undeniably, news is becoming more specified, as people are beginning to pick and choose the pieces of news that they want to see by using programs such as Google Reader or, to some degree, Digg and Reddit. This means, as one of the panelists (not totally positive which one) on the New Media Vs. Traditional Journalism panel said, that people aren't going to the main pages of websites as much, but are instead clicking into the content that they want to see, exclusively.

What this means for journalism as an industry is less clicks, which means that advertisers generally want to pay less for advertising, because they are not guaranteed the views that they are if they put their ads in the actual newspapers. As printed newspapers continue to wither away, however, the advertisers are increasingly finding other places to place their ads.

I think that an interesting project would be to attempt to figure out how newspapers could best utilize advertising online, meaning how they could make best make money without turning to subscriber-only content, something that the online community has shown itself to be vehemently against. That may mean customizing ads to certain customers, which could be done by requiring users to register with a site in order to access its content and, in the process, take an advertising survey that would tailor content to their interests. It could mean tracking what articles people click on a regular basis and building their ad content off of that.

Or, of course, none of these could be viable, and the only solution may be, eventually, some type of subscription-based content, something that would, unfortunately, push the news into the hands of the elite and cause a step back in the news revolution that has occurred over the last fifteen or so years.