Instead of newspapers, think CDs
With the whole newspaper death watch meme being a particular topic of interest, this post by Nielsen’s top UK analyst Alex Burmaster caught my eye. Alex says that while the newspaper industry will shrink and change, you can’t talk about it going completely extinct – a conclusion I’d agree with as well.
Alex makes a parallel between newspapers and online news, and CDs and MP3 players:
”We saw a similar story a couple of years ago when it came to the effect of the digital industry on music sales. The predictable “death of the CD” headlines followed and whilst there is little debate that traditional CD sales have been hit hard, the format is by no means extinct.
”Of course, CDs are a different media from newspapers, but the themes of physicality, practicality, familiarity, and convenience for the masses are consistent themes. Digital can’t replace the traditional walk to get the morning papers, reading the Sunday papers in bed, or an impulse purchase of a newspaper for a train journey.”
I think that’s right – but it only applies for those of us who are 30+. I’m not so sure anyone under 25 is hard wired to want to pick up and play a CD just like I’m not sure they are naturally inclined to want to read their news on paper.
Mobile news
That’s something I thought of again when looking at how far mobile news services have advanced over the past two years.
In 2006, we represented a client called Mobizines whose mission was to create a mobile news stand for your phone. Essentially you could download a range of WAP type mags and read them while on the train or whatever.
One of Mobizines biggest sells was that you could now read stuff properly on public transport rather than trying to open up a paper while your face was in someone else’s armpit – and we recruited ‘conceptual artist’ Liam Yeates who had made a custom built ‘commute suite’ complete with in built fan, water bottle and so on to make that point.
Ultimately Mobizines was one of those ideas that was a bit before its time, but I wonder whether that time has now come after looking at some of the news applications on the iPhone.
Though I live here in London, the New York Times (or at least its world, business and tech sections) has replaced my morning paper – it’s made reading a newspaper on the phone a reasonably pleasurable and easy experience.
Same goes for the Telegraph whose iPhone app I downloaded yesterday for the first time.
So regards the conclusion: “Whether it’s habit, touch and feel, familiarity, techno-illiteracy or convenience, a significant chunk of the population will still require a physical version to hold in their hands.” Yes they will, but their numbers will decrease over time.
As Warren Buffet famously said: “Newspaper readers are heading into the cemetery, while non newspaper readers are just getting out of college. It’s hard to make money buying a business that’s in permanent decline.”
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Thanks for a fascinating post. It’s encouraging to read an essay that does not merely sound the death knell of print and gleefully dances on its grave, but takes the time to instead characterize this as a time of dramatic change and then goes on to intelligently address that change.