For the first time in their careers, journalists are faced with the unenviable task of writing about the demise of their profession. Sure, it's a bit pre-emptive, but print journalists have reasons to be worried.
The Audit Bureau of Circulations reports that the average weekday circulation of nearly 400 daily papers slid 10.6 per cent between April and September 2009 compared with the same six-month period last year. That was bigger than the 7.1 per cent decline recorded during the previous six months.
It's clearly a worldwide trend. The two major Japanese Shimbuns are down at least two million each from their peak 1980's circulation. In India, one of the last major markets where circulation is actually rising, newspapers are battling TV, which is grabbing an ever larger share of the advertising cake.
So why is print journalism staring into an abyss?
One, younger readers are NOT reading newspapers. The Neiman Journalism Labs, a Harvard University project, says teenagers now spend on an average three minutes a day reading news and that too on their handhelds. Youngsters who don't read newspapers like to say, "I'll buy the paper if you can show me one news item that happened today." This generation is not going to graduate to newspapers like an earlier one did from Superman comics.
Two, classifieds are moving online. Cars, for instance, are more convenient to check out online - there's no pressure from a pushy salesman. On classified sites like Craiglist, you can save searches and come back at leisure. Newspapers face one major disadvantage in that they can't allow advertisers to talk directly to individual readers. Newspaper advertising is like spraying Agent Orange and hoping it does the job, but never being able to verify how effective it was.
In recent times, the iconic Boston Globe has threatened to shut down its print edition. The New York Times Co, which owns the Globe, offered a million dollars to anyone who would take the publication off its hands. Business Week, which used to sell 6000 ad pages in its heyday, was once valued at $1 by its banker.
According to the Neiman Journalism Labs, a market as huge as the United States (GNP $14,000 billion) is able to support only one main daily newspaper per city.
Charging for content won't work. True, the NYT is about to become a pay-per-use site on the premise that people will fork out scarce dollars for premium content. But writing is not like, say, music. If a particular Alesha Dixon song is available only at one website, you can get it nowhere else. News is different -- if NYT won't tell you about the swine flu scare unless you subscribe, then readers will go to CNN. If CNN goes pay, they will watch public television or get the news from radio. The Financial Times website (parts of which are premium) carries a pathetic appeal after each story, asking readers not to copy and forward it.
The future perhaps belongs to either of the two models:
1. Free newspapers: In the medium term, this will do as there are still people who like to read in a printed format. They like to occasionally scan newspapers and magazines for local crime news, classifieds, sales, coupons.
2. Free websites: A generation from now, the web will be as ubiquitous as TV. People are reading books and news on their iPhones. Some, like this writer, read books only on their Kindle-like devices.
More than 500 newspapers and magazines have joined Journalism Online, an online payment platform being launched later this year. The company, founded by three media veterans, has not named participants, but suggested they could generate an annual $50 to $100 per subscriber from the websites' most active 10 per cent of viewers with minimal loss of visitors. Consumers will log into the Journalism Online system once to access a portfolio of news from various providers' websites and electronic platforms.
If the current print publications move online, they surely will have issues to sort out - what does a web-based daily/weekly look like? How do you get readers to come to you if you're no longer delivered to them? How can you keep the level of journalism high when the income from ads is so low?
Journalists, and others who matter in journalism, will first have to unlearn the rules of the last century.
As US marketing guru Dave Morgan says: "The notion that the purity of newspaper journalism is the cornerstone upon which today's great metropolitan newspapers were built is revisionist history. Most of today's great newspapers were built through achieving dominant distribution in their markets, not through delivering better journalism. Most US cities used to have two or more competitive newspapers. The eventual winner was almost always the one that won on the battle on distribution or advertising, almost never on journalism. Great journalism came later. Pulitzers don't make great newspapers. Local distribution monopolies make great newspapers."
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