While the New York Times reports that 2009 was officially the worst year for the newspaper industry in ‘decades’, journalism blogger and pundit Alan Mutter says 2010 could be even worse.

Three US based stats from Alan’s blog:

1 – Classified advertising is down a massive 64% from the $17.3 billion it brought US papers in 2005.  Thanks Craiglist, and in the UK, the likes of gumtree

2 – Retail advertising was down 36% over the same period

3 – National advertising was down 44% since 2005

The problem is of course also a demographic one.   Apparently in the US, the average age of newspaper readers is 55+ as shown in the video below (via Steveouting.com).

And the UK probably isn’t too different in that respect, a Parliamentary Committee two years ago found that newspaper readership fell 40% among 25-34 year olds, but rose by 4% among 55-64 year olds – and if anything that trend will have increased over the past two years, given that the UK nationals have lost more than the population of Wales in readers since then.

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• Times editor: ‘We are going to lose a lot of passing traffic’ (guardian.co.uk)
• Audience for print newspapers will shrink faster than Alan Mutter predicts (trueslant.com)

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)!

It’s a simple truth that the vast majority of blog posts such as this one draw on existing news stories and then build on them in some fashion.    Hence the statistic from the Pew Research Center that 95% of stories with ‘new information’ originate from the traditional media, particularly newspapers.

Conducted in the Baltimore Maryland area, researchers found that 83% of stories were ‘repetitive’, with the other 17% that were new coming almost exclusively from what’s termed traditional media.   General interest newspapers were responsible for 48% of ‘new news’, specialist titles generated 13%, TV in the Baltimore area was responsible for 28% of new content, while new media only generated 4%.

It’s a fair point: Our society depends on organisations who have the resources and professionalism to delve into and uncover the stories we all need to know about.   Very few people who work in the digital media space would argue otherwise.   Instead in response to this research I’d say:

For non professional and online media outlets to break almost 1 in 20 news stories is quite high.   And there have been some major ones – for example, here and here

Even if social media doesn’t break news, it does have a role in moving it along and magnifying it considerably.   For example, look at what happened to Eurostar (the train service between London and Paris / Brussels) before Christmas

No one realistically thinks social media will ever replace traditional news gathering outlets, whether they publish in print or online.   But it is a game changer, and the organisations themselves seem to think so as evidenced by Sky News installing Tweetdeck across journalists’ computers.

Social engineering doomed to fail?
One thing that I do question is social engineering to ‘make’ people read newspapers.   True, giving 18 year olds free (print) subscriptions has had some impact in France, but I wonder how successful these sorts of schemes will be long-term.

Paid Content has an article about the (opposition) Labour culture spokesperson in Scotland, Pauline McNeill advocating a similar scheme North of the border.

The article also includes some stats about the mountain Scottish newspapers face, with ‘The Scotsman’, the paper that holds itself up as Scotland’s national quality paper, seeing a circulation drop from 75,402 to a pretty shocking 46,300 since 2002, and The Daily Record (the main tabloid), dropping from 626,646 to 323,01 in the same period.

Image – Swanksalot

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• Newspapers and Traditional Media Still Produce Most News (marketingpilgrim.com)

A study that shows the limits of social media in helping people discover new content – but also shows the importance of online editorial endorsement  – comes from Knowledge Networks in the US (via Digital Media) .

Viewers were asked how they discover new content and how they decide what to watch, both for TV and online video.   For online video, social media from strangers ranked seventh in terms of recommendations, with verbal word of mouth (41%) and search (32%) coming top.

In other words, even on the Internet people are most likely to be directed to stuff that someone’s told them about face to face.

For regular TV, TV advertising is actually the prime source of content discovery at 46% – who said commercials were dead!  However, social media from strangers only scored 6%.   Meanwhile, just as they are for online videos, verbal recommendations are key in helping people find out about offline TV shows (38%)

Conclusions: Concentrate on online PR, and a search + social media strategy
So is the conclusion that a social media and online engagement strategy is largely a waste of time, and you might as well put your cash into both TV and search ads?  Hardly.

First of all, it’s obvious that even if someone tells you about a great new viral face to face they must have heard or read about it somewhere else.   As always off and online word of mouth have to very much work in tandem.

Secondly, stories or reviews on the Internet ranked highly (27%) in terms of helping people find out about new online videos.   In other words just as you would offline, editorial endorsement online from major blogs and news sources (the lines between the two are blurred anyway) works.

Finally, the Knowledge Networks study shows the effectiveness of search when it comes to helping people discover online video.

However if your social media and search strategy works together then search ends up being even more effective.   That’s shown by an earlier Comscore study that said that people exposed to both what they called “influenced social” and paid search had 233% heavier search behaviour.

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• comScore and VideoEgg to Measure How Online Ads Impact Offline Purchases (mashable.com)
• Zenith Forecast: In ’09, Only Online Grows (paidcontent.org)
• HuffPo’s tweets and comments to be sponsored (guardian.co.uk)

Bob Knorpp of the Beancast (which I’m on tonight) alerted me to this statement by Yates Buckley of Unit 9, made to coincide with last week’s Creativity and Technology event at London’s Saatchi Gallery:

“If you are a creative and don’t know about technology you’ll be out of a job soon.”

It’s a statement that I imagine touched a lot of raw nerves as it zeroes in on the debate raging in agencies today.  In fact, I’d point to another quote made by Guardian columnist Roy Greenslade the other month that nicely encapsulates it.   Greenslade talked about the fundamental divide between those who think the digital media revolution is transformative, or whether it’s tactical.

Substitute the word marketing in place of journalism here:

The split (in the pro and anti camps) is both philosophical and practical.

“There are those (with whom I agree) who believe that the digital media revolution is in the process of transforming journalism and those (such as Murdoch and most traditional newspaper publishers) who believe the net is merely another platform rather than an instrument of transformation.”

It’s a complex argument, but the truth as always surely lies somewhere in between.

I tell the 20-something execs at Cow that the skills set they’ll need in ten years time is different to the skills set they have now (and we have a responsibility to help them get there).   That’s due to consumers, and so agencies, straddling the old and new media divide, meaning that you still need to know about the old way of doing things while also embracing the new.

Beth Harte in fact expresses it perfectly in her post ‘PR 2.0 will double your workload‘.

Perhaps the voice of sanity in all this comes from Iain Tait of Poke, an agency that’s squarely at the forefront of digital marketing.   Iain talks about the dangers of getting carried away with technology for the sake of it:

“Now that we’ve been invited to the party and have money, influence and power, I worry we are like a bunch of kids with the keys to the sweetshop.   Do we need all that?  People like things that are free and simple – money likes stuff that is slick.   Building big things is fun and impresses people, but it has no value.”

Image – Sammy0716