US newspaper gloom overshadows industry survey

The gloom hanging over the US newspaper industry is distorting an otherwise optimistic mood among the world’s newspaper editors, according to a global survey of newsroom opinion. Only 30 per cent of North American newspaper editors polled by Zogby International believed that the quality of journalism would improve over the next decade, compared to 45.5 per cent in Western Europe and over 60 per cent in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. The majority of blogs and other online commentary about the industry came from the US, said Bertrand Pecquerie, Director of the World Editors Forum, who described one recent meeting of editors in Delaware as being “like a funeral”. Editors outside the US “don't understand it at all,” he said. The Newsroom Barometer report, sponsored by Thomson Reuters and the World Editors Forum, found that the pessimism in the US was balanced by booming new markets such as India and resilient print markets such as Japan.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c19e3d84-1b98-11dd-9e58-0000779fd2ac.html
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