The future of newspapers (and the $100 I’m going to take from Jose Leal)

Share This!

I have a bet.

For some time now, at least a year, I’ve been offering this wager: $100 says 10 years from now, I’ll be able to buy a newspaper out of a rack on the street. Jose Leal has taken me up on the bet, and this post will serve as the record. I also have it marked on calendar: July 21, 2018.

This all came about when I left a comment to a post by Mitch Joel. Mitch reported on Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s grave forecast for the newspaper business. It has become a given in some circles that newspapers will soon be a relic of a bygone era. To me, that’s just another variation on the never-ending stream of “(fill in the blank) is dead” pronouncements.

The newspaper business is, to be sure, on the ropes. It has never been a business prone to adaptation under new circumstances: The print media turned its nose up at television, certain that real journalism could not be practiced on TV. It was a decision that resulted in reduced newspapers’ market share as TV news provided an appealing alternative.

Today, news organizations are hamstrung by changing news consumption habits. Among those who get their news online, aggregators like Yahoo and Google News are more likely to serve as your gateway to the news than your local or metropolitan daily newspaper. Classified advertising, once the lifeblood of newspapers’ finances, have moved online to Craig’s List and eBay. Circulation rates are dropping. Papers are taking axes to their editorial staffs, reducing size of the paper, and taking other drastic measures.

All of which makes it pretty tempting to jump on the “newspapers are dead” bandwagon.

Print, however, still has strengths. While many newspapers will perish before the industry figures out how to turn things around by playing to those strengths, print journalism will adapt. Print newspapers in 10 years won’t much resemble a newspaper today. My guess is that their focus will be hyperlocal. How good is the web for finding out about the dry clearners opening up down the street or the outcome of the town hall meeting? It doesn’t pay for Joe’s Tavern to advertise on the web when Joe’s customer base is limited to people who live within a two-mile radius. It does pay to advertise in a newspaper that lands on everybody’s front door, that people pick up before they board the train for the city.

Or newspapers could go in some other direction altogether. We’ll see. In the end, there will be considerably less print journalism (somne newspapers will experience considerable success on the web), but print journalism will survive and possibly even thrive again.

Of course, the industry has to endure until the bureaucracies that control them suck it up and change course. There is plenty of evidence to support print media’s survival:

• Most of the 10 largest newspapers are gaining, not losing, circulation. Nationwide, daily newspaper circulation is 50,827,454, down .1% from a year ago, according to the Newspaper Association of America. Details
• A Readership Institute poll finds that only one-fifth of people who subscribe to newspapers visit the newspaper’s website in a month, and 60% never.
• While readership is declining among 18-24-year-olds, it is declining slowly. The age group may place less value overall in print newspapers, but some will continue to read them. (There are even young people who prefer listening to vinyl instead of CDs.)
• Readers of print engage more with the printed newspaper than with the Web site. “Ratings for four experiences – ‘gives me something to talk about,’ ‘looks out for my interests,’ ‘ad usefulness’ and ‘touches and inspires me’ were significantly higher for the newspaper than for the site,” according to the Readership Institute study.
• While readership of local newspapers has declined, local newspapers remain the second most consumed medium in the U.S. after major network TV news, according to Ketchum’s ”Media: Myths and Realities” survey.
• Local and national newspapers are also trusted more than web resources, the Ketchum study reveals.
• Personal observation counts for a lot, too. Riding on BART, I find far more people of all ages reading newspapers than their iPhones or laptops. The same is true on the subways and trains of New York. (And when I pick up the newspaper somebody has left behind, odds are they’ve done the crossword or the Soduko puzzle.)

The readership decline is gradual and there are plenty of people who will continue reading newspapers, at least long enough for newspapers to make the adjustments necessary to find their new niche in the mostly-digital media landscape.

So I’m happy to take Jose up on the bet.

In his note to me, he added a couple other reasons he thinks newspapers will be fully extinct in a decade. First he sees print as a leading factor in “the rape of our forests.” Most paper companies these days are replanting, though; trees are a renewable resource and paper companies know how to renew it. Second, he points to the energy required to produce newspapers. Fewer newspapers, though, will mean less of an environmental footprint, and we’re likely to see advances in ecological-friendly printing. (Soy-based inks are already popular, for instance.)

But Jose mostly believes that the role of journalism is archaic in a world in which anybody can publish, taking “control away from the media organizations and puts it squarely in the hands of the people.” Professional journalism is not about control, however. It’s about the skill and the resources required to track down a story and convey it in a compelling and understandable way. Journalist-reported news is the catalyst for an awful lot of blogging, and the U.S. Army isn’t going to embed somebody with a cool MySpace profile into the 1st Mountain Division on its next mission. Professional journalism will most certainly co-exist with citizen-reported news. Most of it will move online; I heard a Houston Chronicle editor say that the website comes first.

Jose has further articulated his position in a post to his blog. Others, like Jay Moonah, have a more balanced view (as evidenced by a post from Jay’s blog back in March). In his comment on Mitch’s post, Jay wrote:

As I often do I’ll lean on McLuhan who said “people don’t read newspapers, they get into them like a warm bath.” The impact of media forms like paper cannot be displaced simply by displaying the same information in another form because it’s about more than the information. Much, MUCH more. That’s not going to change in 10 years, hell that’s not going to change in a few generations. My 9 month old daughter _might_ not be able to get a newspaper off the stand by the time she’s a grandmother… maybe. But I wouldn’t bet a $100 on that, either.

Jay’s right. I expect I’ll still get USA Today delivered to my hotel rooms and have access to plenty of other forms of print journalism, including reporting included in reinvigorated daily newspapers, free giveaway newspapers that are getting more and more popular, and community weekly newspapers.

So, Jose, I fully expect to take $100 from you a decade from now. Of course, given the way other things are going, that’ll probably be worth about a Euro-and-a-half...or $3.50 Canadian.

1. Great post, Shel. A welcome breath of fresh air. The Readership Institute study has interesting implications for internal communications. Check out my blog post about this at http://www.typepad.com/t/app/weblog/post?id=53024808&saved_changes=1&blog_id=266965.

   Posted by Ron Shewchuk  on  07/21  at  10:49 AM

2. They may still be around in 10 years but not at every stand.  They’ll be specialty items that you can still find at bookstores.

   Posted by Business networking  on  07/21  at  05:15 PM

3. Business Networking, can you maybe offer some reasons you think so, particularly in light of the evidence to the contrary I’ve listed in my post?

   Posted by Shel Holtz  on  07/22  at  11:17 AM

4. Sure, my reasons is both Google CEO believes it.  Steve Ballmer also <a >sees and end to print media in 10 years</a>.  They are probably the two most powerful people in media today.  Let’s remember, Microsoft has a stake in MSNBC and could purchase the largest newspapers in the world if they saw a future there.

   Newspapers will remain in print until everyone over 35 years old dies off.  I say over 35 because these people did not grow up with the internet.  People under 35 had access to it while still at a influential age.

   It cost bucks to print newspaper and without the economies of scale you are not going to see them everywhere.  They will need to raise the prices and sell in specialty stores.

   Posted by Business networking  on  07/22  at  12:42 PM

5. Opps, didn’t realize no html is allowed in the comments, so my link didn’t go through.  Here is the link to Steve Ballmer talking about an end to print media (http://www.engadget.com/2008/06/06/ballmer-sees-the-end-of-print-media-in-ten-years/).  I’m sure there is a better one from Washington Post but I didn’t see it.

   Posted by Business networking  on  07/22  at  12:44 PM

6. I know what Ballmer said and my post was directly related to Schmidt. Clearly, I don’t agree. First, there are a lot of people under 35 reading print. My daughter, 19, is a child of the digital age, but still can’t wait to get her hands on the next issue of Cosmo. There is no magical cutoff at which people on one side read print and people on the other don’t. Yes, there will be fewer, but enough to keep the industry alive, particularly given the industry’s inevitable changes to leverage print’s strengths.

   Economies of scale? So, how do you explain the success of Print on Demand (POD)?

   I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. But 10 years ago, the Web was already here and people THEN were predicting the death of print and the inevitability of the paperless office. It didn’t happen. I’m betting it won’t a decade from now, either. Literally.

   Posted by Shel Holtz  on  07/22  at  03:48 PM

7. Also, it’s hard to tell what technology will arise in the next 10 years.  Print has survived now because of 3 reasons:

   1.  The Digital Divide - a significant portion of the population is not online, which is hard to believe.
   2.  Lack of portability of the internet.

   But these are quickly becoming smaller issues.  OLPC (http://laptop.org/) will make computers affordable for everyone.  As it gains in popularity more people will be online. 

   Lack of portability is being fixed with city wide wi-fi and PMPs, PDAs, and other media devices which will make it so you can carry thousands of newspapers in your pocket.

   Anyways, we’ll have to wait 10 years to see, but you can put me on your bet.  Look me up in 10 years so we can settle this debt.

   Posted by Business networking  on  07/22  at  03:59 PM

8. Are you Jose Leal, Business Networking? If not, the bet is with Jose—I’m only making one! If you are, no worries. I’m planning an yearly report on the state of the newspaper business.

   Print has other strengths. I readily admit online communication will dramatically change print. I just don’t see, given the research, that it’ll be that far gone in a mere 10 years.

   Posted by Shel Holtz  on  07/22  at  05:46 PM

9. Only time will tell.  Very interesting topic.  I’m Theron Nolen.

   Posted by Business networking  on  07/22  at  05:49 PM

10. Well i still belive reading real papers instead of online giving me more satisfaction and printable version is much fun…

    Posted by johnbaem  on  07/24  at  12:10 PM

11. I agree 100% with Shel on this.  My job is on the Web, and I still am lost without a paper over breakfast.

    Posted by Neal Linkon  on  07/25  at  03:20 AM

12. Yea your right there. It’s a moment of peace…

    Posted by Giftoverload.com  on  07/26  at  02:15 AM

13. I strongly agree, Shel, that print will survive, although the web and electronic reading devices will heavily influence and force the change of many “traditional” print media, what they look like and perhaps the roles they play.

    One example of how a local newspaper can adapt is the Portland Tribune (portlandtribune.com). This independent local paper launched a few years ago as a twice-weekly. Now they’ve gone weekly but tout themselves as a “daily” – an online daily. And they use each medium – print and web – to promote the other.

    Along with that I believe there will always be a role for the professional journalist, related to the role of the gatekeeper and some level of credibility, even in these days of trouble in the journalism world. And this is where citizen journalism can come in and keep professional journalism honest.

    A couple more thoughts and observations.

    1. I like Jay Moonah’s analogy of reading a newspaper as slipping into a warm bath.

    I believe that the human creature is more suited to reading printed media over electronic media. It has to do with reading an object of reflected light versus “projected” light, such as a computer screen. I think it’s in our biological make up, and has little or nothing to do with which generation you’re in and whether you grew up with the Internet or not.

    Because of that, reading print will always be more comfortable and “comforting” for us humans, whether it’s reading the newspaper on the train, the paper over breakfast, or a good book at the beach.

    2. The predictions that computers would result in the paperless office, the demise of newspapers, etc., have fallen miserably short. The fact is, computers have provided us a means of producing more paper documents than ever before—and faster. Sure, there are whole enterprise systems in which mostly large companies have moved their documentation systems online, and that’s a good thing.

    But the advent of the PC has also given power to millions of individuals and smaller enterprises to create paper documents.

    And, what has the PC and Internet done for the likes of the book publishing industry. Seems to me it’s more robust than it’s ever been.

    Just look at Amazon.com and Powells.com, other online bookstores...and the boom of the thousands of private booksellers on Amazon.

    Print is far from dead. And I just don’t see it going away.

    Posted by Sam Vigil Jr  on  07/27  at  10:23 AM

14. I agree with Shel on this.  My occupation is on the Web, I still believe reading actual papers instead of online giving me more satisfaction.
    ____________
    Aady
    Wide Circles

    Posted by Aady Pitt  on  07/27  at  08:49 PM

Name:

Email:

Location:

URL:

Remember my personal information

Notify me of follow-up comments?

Submit the word you see below: