The Nation's chief photographer Nanthasit Nitmatha has been seeing both good and bad signs for the industry.
Many Thai newspapers seem to have stopped expanding completely, and many have resorted to costcutting, which in many cases involved shrinking their workforces. Readers may be deserting mainstream print media, he has been told.
Where are they going, then? Some of them to his Facebook account, perhaps. "NationPhoto" has attracted 600 "fans" in just a week, and he and his friends who created the account haven't even really tried yet.
"I'm surprised. We just introduced the fan page and here they come," he said.
What's the most important news for old and new reporters marking Reporters' Day today? As far as their career is concerned, this is the day the possibility of selfpublishing is closer to reality than ever before.
And it will get even closer tomorrow, and more so the day after tomorrow. Unimaginable just a few years ago, personal publishing now is looming as the next big thing in the media world, which is already witnessing the proliferation of blogs, RSS and PDFpublishing systems, or independent writers hawking their work on ereaders' "bookshelves". In fact, the infrastructure is already there. Equipped with notebook computers and highquality mobile phones, a group of 1020 reporters can produce a news website as farreaching as Internet access goes, or strike a deal with an ereader company. The only pending question is the financial viability of such a business model.
Reporters, like their counterparts in many other fields, have enjoyed a salary bubble, and this is why oldtimers will likely choose to remain in the comfort zone of the old business model - because a leap of faith will mean a substantial plunge in income. New technologies are giving everyone everything, except an income to match the good old days.
But mediawatchers around the world are foreseeing inevitable changes, which will require major adjustments by both journalists and publishers.
"Right now, the ereader and tablet are the most promising new potential sources of revenue for newspapers," said Roger Fidler, programme director for Digital Publishing at the Donald W Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri. How soon will depend on each coun¬try's circumstances.
"Within 10 years, I believe the majority of subscribers to newspapers and magazines will be reading digital editions delivered to mobilereading devices," Fidler said.
As of early February, 99 newspapers from around the world had made their way to the Kindle, providing content free of advertising. It's a relatively slow migration, but one explanation is that the current Kindle experiment is totally a publishers' initiative, so the halfheart¬ed approach is understandable.
For digital publishing to take off, the initiative must come from those who have been strongly enabled by blogs, RSS, PDFpublishing systems and other easytoadopt contentpublishing tools, analysts say. "This is the age of the independent publisher," declared a mediawatch blog.
For journalists like Nanthasit, uncharted territory lies ahead. It may present a lot of uncertainties, but there are also promises and opportunities.
