THE END OF NEWSPAPERS IN PRINT
Last week, a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos predicted the end of printed editions of newspapers by the year 2014. For reasons that will become apparent later this week this is something I've been looking at quite closely in recent weeks.
The fact is that most print newspapers are out of date before they even get to their readers. As more people turn to the web to get their news then advertising revenue will follow in biggest numbers than it currently does.
I predict it will take a little longer here in Thailand for print newspapers to totally disappear because the Internet is still a relatively undeveloped media, and also a lot of people don't currently use the Internet to get their news.
For publishers the Internet is exciting. It's not limited and is incredibly interactive - all the things that print isn't. And if you can give users a reason to visit your site then you're half way there.
Very few print publications have scrapped print totally and moved online. There is an example of Finland's second biggest business title moving online late last year, and that seems to be the biggest one I can find. Almost every newspaper has a website - some with more success than others. It's a brave decision to scrap print totally but fortune favors the brave, right ?
6 comments:
I'm skeptical that this will happen at all, let alone so soon. That's only six years away! People have been predicted the extinction of books, too. And while newspapers are probably in more danger than books, I think it's much more likely that paper newspapers will shrink to a core readership of people without disappearing completely, at least for another generation. There are plenty of folks who enjoy reading the newspaper with breakfast, on the train to work, or what have you, in a way that isn't quite as convenient with electronic devices. Don't forget that (at least in the U.S.) the Sunday newspaper is a delivery vehicle for a massive amount of sales ads and coupons for various stores. And since the newspaper business is just a way of getting people to pay for advertisements anyway, that market seems likely to stick around. People like their glossy full-color ads for widescreen TVs and all that. Much nicer than browsing online and printing out some coupons, at least for the foreseeable future. So, while the market for print news will continue to shrink (and newspapers will have to get more and more of their revenue from online ads or other new sources, naturally), they're not disappearing in this generation.
So let it be written, so let it be done.
The biggest problem I've seen in the rush to provide instant news is that research into the story and verification of facts are lost. So is it better to get the news fast, or to get what is really news?
Thanks for your comments.
I think it will eventually come down to money, sadly. Publishers make most of their income from advertising and as soon as it becomes uneconomical to continue in print then the switch will happen.
I will write more about this later this week - with an example of a title here in Thailand that is planning a move from print to online.
I have no doubt it will be about money--it's a business, after all. And I'm sure there will be plenty of publications that make the switch, choosing to compete instead with the endless web-only publication already out there. The potential market is larger, and thus the potential revenue is certainly greater. But I still think that's a far cry from newspapers being extinct in half a decade. The key phrase in your reply is "as soon as it becomes uneconomical". I'd expect to see the printed newspaper prices to go up, catering to their die-hard reader base, and/or start to be more like magazines, acting as a supplement to online material, before I'd ever expect extinction. People don't just read newspapers for up-to-the-minute news. Things like op-eds and political cartoons and local interest stories, entertainment, etc.--none of this needs to be as instantaneous as the web allows for. The paper format works just fine for these things. It seem that this is the same kind of logic that predicts that movie theaters will go out of business due to online downloading (both legal and illegal). In that case, Hollywood and theater owners need to realize they're selling the experience of seeing a movie in the theater, which is a social event potentially better than just watching it at home. That there business is flagging is only evidence that they don't realize that. Same thing goes for newspapers--the experience of reading a newspaper. It's an enjoyable thing that people will continue to pay for. There are some massively valuable newspaper "brand names" out there. They're not going to go so quietly into the ether, even if for no other reason than stubbornness.
That kind of quick extinction would mean how many hundreds of thousands of people in the newspaper industry worldwide suddenly unemployed, since the new format no longer requires printing, delivery, or even an ad sales department (Google will do that for you). So I don't buy it.
Rikker, thanks again for your comments. I'm going to save my reply for Friday, if that's okay with you? I'm going to write more about my own experiences with the newspaper being published by our company. I can see both sides of this because we also have a well-established brand name magazine and we would never dream of that going online-only. For niche titles the future has to be online, and on Friday I'll give you some of the financials behind the decision we're making to take our newspaper online only. It should make for some interesting reading.
Thanks again for your comments.
Sounds good. Look forward to reading it.
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