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Monday, July 21, 2008
The future of newspapers (and the $100 I’m going to take from Jose Leal)
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.