The future of newspapers in an online world

Mar 16, 2010 by Dirk Singer

Was the subject of a presentation I gave at today’s Social Media World Forum at Olympia (London).

With me having, perhaps too ambitiously, crammed in both SXSW and this event in one week, I’m aware that I rattled through this at great speed – or as one tweet put it – presented an information red bull!

As a result, the presentation is embedded above.   I’ve also included supplementary points / facts / stats with links below:

• Demand media pushes out 4000 pieces of content a day - an article from Wired that’s a good intro to possibly the largest and most notorious of the content farms
• UK national newspapers have lost 1.2 million in the past two years (slide six).  I compiled the table from the ABC figures Jan 08, 09 and 10.  3.1 million lost readers is more than the population of Wales
• Since 1951, the UK population has increased by 25% but newspaper circulations have gone down 30%
• 96% of ‘new’ news is broken by the legacy media
• The latest Pew State of the Media report, out yesterday and worth reading, it includes some good (and recent) pointers about the direction the media as a whole (and not just newspapers) is heading
• Danny Sullivan’s interview with Eric Schmidt of Google, where Schmidt speaks up for the essential role major newspapers have in society
• Most journalists consult blogs for research – according to George Washington University and Cision
• PwC in a report last year said we should stop talking about the death of newspapers and talk about the rise of media brands

Any other questions, please do email me (dirk at the rabbitagency.com)!