The decline of print media – regular round up

Mar 12, 2009 by Dirk Singer

If I wanted to I could write a post every day about the decline of print – in particular – newspaper media, so I’ll restrict myself to occasional round-ups. A few things from the past few days:

In The New York Times, Richard Perez Pena looks at how many places in the US are turning from two paper, to one paper, to eventually no paper cities. This comes as the 146 year old Seattle Post Intelligencer is to become online only, with a more restricted news remit.

Though the New York Times has had problems of its own, on a personal note I really rate it’s iPhone / iPod product. It’s resulted in the NYT becoming, for me here in London, my newspaper of choice. Statement of the obvious but even ten years ago that wouldn’t have been possible (or at least very difficult).

In fact, in one sense newspapers have never been more popular.

Newspaper Death Watch (which covers what it says on a daily basis) talks about Nielsen data demonstrating a 12% year on year increase in unique visitors to US newspaper websites. Yet at the same time, the blog points to Time Magazine’s article on the ten most endangered papers in America, in highlighting the disconnect between the fact that newspapers have a larger audience than ever thanks to the Internet, yet many are in serious trouble.

One answer of why this is so comes from an excellent piece penned by Stephen Quinn, a journalism professor of Deakin University, on Australian marketing website Mumbrella.

Professor Quinn goes through some statistics, including ones which show that classified advertising at one point used to account for 40% of profits in 2000. Now they account for 23%. Thank Craigslist and Gumtree (a former Cow client).

However, he then talks about how new media may not turn out to be newspapers’ saviours. Professor Deakin points out that on one hand the New York Times gets a massive 20 million unique users a day. Yet revenues from its web based advertising would only pay for a fifth of its $200 million newsgathering budget.

Professor Quinn also quotes a December 2008 research report from Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, which says: “The notion that the enormous cost of real news-gathering might be supported by the ad load of display advertising down the side of the page, or by the revenue share from having a Google search box in the corner of the page, or even by a 15-second teaser … prior to a news clip, is idiotic on its face.”

As I’ve mentioned before, regional and local papers in particular are facing the crunch. Writing in today’s Sun (article not yet available online), the paper’s former editor laments their fall saying that the CEO of Britain’s press association news agency had recently told him that judges were complaining that important cases were going unreported due to local papers slashing their operations.

Meanwhile as the Guardian generates a great deal of discussion with its announcement that it’s opening up its million article archive to developers, on his Online Journalism blog, Paul Bradshaw asks whether other UK national newspapers are really embracing the Internet yet.

Paul looked at the small print that certain newspapers have concerning links, for example the Daily Mail, “You may not provide a link to this web site from any other web site without first obtaining Associated’s prior written consent.” Apparently the Daily Telegraph changed its Tcs and Cs after Paul contacted them.

Finally, spotted via Alice Wessendorf on Twitter is this MediaPost piece, which provides a bit of a reality check. Namely that print isn’t going to vanish overnight, but it’s a long term trend.

According to the Rosen Group in the US, 83% of consumers thought daily papers were still relevant, but only 45% said they will definitely be around in ten years.

When it came to their top news source, 29% cited a news website, 18% said print newspapers and 16% said online newspapers.

Photo – VanCity Allie