I see daily newspapers as dinosaurs-most of the big city papers are losing money. Advertising (which is their cash cow), seems to be migrating to the Web, in a big way (I would never consider looking for a job in the paper). Also, my own situation: years ago, I managed to sign up for free internet paper versions (BOSTON GLOBE, NY TIMES, LA TIMES, etc.), and I continiue to read these papers on-line for free. Most of them have sent me subscription offers (so you can read certain features-I politely decline them!). So I am getting a service for free-am I being unethical? I mean, if a free service is provided, I am going to take it-I figure if the papers decide to charge for on-line use, then I might as well buy the paper version. Anyway, are peple like me stealing? 
I agree, I think they’re in a bad sich. Papers are losing ground, as you say. At the same time, it’s much easier to read a paper qua paper on dead tree than on the Net. Fine, display them online, and it’s much harder to display a lot of ads, their revenue source.
Of course it’s not stealing. Your availing yourself of something offered for free. Rock on.
Exactly. Which is why I don’t do it much (post my material to the web).
Disclaimer: I current own a town-level newspaper and have been in publishing for almost twenty years in one capacity or another. Heck, between browsing on this Sunday morning I’m writing an OpEd.
It’s very VERY true that circulation for the larger dailies is in freefall. According to Editor & Publisher magazine it’s been as much as 1% decline per year since 1996 (data remembered off the top of my head). That number applies to morning dailies. Afternoon dailies have seen a total drop in the last ten years of over 30% in circulation. Oofah.
On the other hand…
Weekly, community-based newspapers are actually growing in readership over the same span of time. Those news outlets focused on providing day-to-day and local political and economic stories still have readership.
The cause, in my opinion? The prevalence of news outlets for national and international news. There’s simply no reason for readers to pick up a paper to learn about the War in Iraq or what’s happening in Japan or somesuch. That information is available faster, more completely, and more conveniently on the web as well as through radio and television. It’s a mode of news conveyance that’s outmoded at this point.
But people WILL still pick up papers to see community event schedules and see information about their Mayors and City Councils. These are things largely ignored by the national and large-city press as too small for them to bother with. That leaves the market opportunity open for community and alternative newspapers like The Marietta Register (mine) or The Chicago Reader (to use an obvious example).
So weeklies are still doing fine (I closed 15K of business just Friday afternoon). Dailies, especially those not available overnight, aren’t.
I feel compelled to point out, however, that all that free content that Ralph brings up will only be available for free as long as the large dailies can economically justify it. If the web truly brings about the doom of daily newspapers then all that stuff will end up behind a ‘pay-to-play’ wall.
The short answer is that newspapers aren’t dying, but they are changing their focus and their business strategy.
At first, newspapers competed with the Internet for readers. Younger people, who comprise the majority of Internet users, do tend to get their news online more than from newspapers. Now, of course, many papers have websites where you can read their content for free. Some papers offer extras for online readers, such as message boards and first dibs on classified ads.
But newspapers aren’t really supported by the fifty cents or whatever that you put into the box. They’re supported by advertising, and a website can offer many more opportunities to sell ads than just offering a dead-tree version.
They’ll also have a permanent market in people who won’t take a laptop to the bathroom. Dead-tree newspapers are far more portable than computers are, so for some people, they make sense.
Robin
Is this really the case? In the case of the Indianapolis Business Journal, they sell the print ads for a buttload, and there are a lot of them in the pape. Online, there are just a few boxes on the homepage that get switched out daily. I’ve seen the pricing and know that their pape is what brings in the doremi.
But it’s pay to read either way, not free, so it probably doesn’t matter much. I would imagine that a broadsheet converted to web would bring in much, much less advert dough.
Exactly. In general, they actually lose money on paying subscribers when it comes to the cost of chasing them. Therefore, a lot of papers will do everything they can to keep you even if you don’t pay the bill. They don’t care if you pay the bill or not, they just need to keep up appearances that you are paying the bill so that you can be counted on the ABC (Audit Bureau of Circulation) audit. A lot of advertisers (most of the ones I’ve worked with anyway) use the ABC audit as the bible of circulation for papers. ABC has rules about what can and what cannot be counted as “paid” circulation so the newspaper has to at least make it look like you’re paying $40 a year to get their paper when in reality you’ve never paid them a dime.
I used to do advertising analyses for newspapers where I would compile all of the insert ad revenue at the ZIP Code level and I could determine what areas had a higher per-subscriber ad revenue. These are the areas that I would recommend that they grow in. It doesn’t matter if a ZIP Code brings in $400,000 in revenue a year if the per-subscriber value is less than $10. That doesn’t come near to covering the cost of pursuing subscribers there. You look for a ZIP that has a per-subscriber ad revenue (a really good one is usually around $60) and you tell them to go nuts there. When they send out subscription offers, they’re doing so simply to gain ad revenue, they don’t care about anything else. The smart ones do analyses like the one I mentioned above, the stupid ones just carpet their distribution area and hope that some of the fish bite.
Despite my pointlesss hijack, the fact of the matter is that it costs a newspaper more money to sign subscribers than they make back from them. Reading a newspaper website is almost preferable to the publisher because they can still count the hit toward their total, which they then use to lure online advertisers and it didn’t cost them a cent to get you there. They prefer that you sign up for an account simply so they can use your demographic data to attract advertisers that prefer a more targeted approach but a hit is a hit. It’s still someone that voluntarily came to their site.
Bottom line: there will always be a market for newspapers, but that market will continue to shrink until it hits a plateau, at which it will likely stay. Fewer people want to read a hard copy than in the past, but there will always be people who won’t read online.
Websites CAN offer more advertising opportunity – it’s just that many papers haven’t figured that out yet.
Few newspapers sell advertising on their front page, but with the Web, your ad can be right next to that breaking news, or that top sports story. Further, you can promise that to more than one ad client, and serve their ads on a rotating basis. It looks bad to have a weekly column sponsored by a particular company in the print version (running the ad at the top makes the whole thing look like advertising), but if the local garden supply center wants to pay for placement, you could make sure their Web ad is on the gardening column’s page every time. Not to mention the inherent advantages of Web vs. print ads – animation and clickthroughs, for example.
My WAG is that that’s a diminishing market. If a fiftysomething like me is just as likely to take a laptop to the bathroom as he is a newspaper, book, or magazine, I expect there’s plenty of younger readers doing the same.
Although I’m on the Internet a lot, I still subscribe to the daily newspaper, and I read it every morning. I find it much faster to read all the headlines, and to focus on the stories I’m interested in, than to click through a bunch of web pages. I haven’t found any newspaper web sites that list as many stories as I see just by flipping through the pages of the hardcopy newspaper. Especially the local stories.
Also, I find it more comfortable to read while lying down on the sofa.
Ed
Which is important, given the current levels of technology. But you’ve always got to be on the lookout for the coming thing!
Here’s an article about an experiment that Gannett is trying.
Local, local, local, I tell you. It’s where the smart money is for newspapers.
A problem is that they seem to focus all their efforts onto keeping their current readers, but don’t try to gain new ones.
Articles & features are aimed at older folks, who already read the paper–young people don’t even give them a look.
Especially true on the comics page.
Eh. There are a lot of places that are not served by a Wi-Fi connection; a dead-tree newspaper always works.
Robin, who does her homework at Starbucks because she’s too cheap to pay for the Wi-Fi.
Robin
The ones I worked with were trying all the time. They did all kinds of research and the results were usually along the lines of a special kids or teens related section one day of the week. Also, publications like Chicago’s Red Eye (produced by the Chicago Tribune) are a reaction to the stuffiness of newspapers and are aimed toward the twenty-somethings.
They just realize it’s a tough market to capture and they don’t want to alienate their current base.
I gave up buying newspapers in 2000, partly because that’s when I got on the net and got news for free, but also partly because I hadn’t realised quite how dishonest they all were once I could access alternative viewpoints. Not the 50% lies of commission and omission I previously thought but more like a 90% deception level.
I’ve recently gone back, in a very small way, to buying the occasional Sunday newspaper but only if they attach a giveaway CD or DVD that appeals to me. In those instances I spend no more than about 5 minutes reading the main points before throwing it away.
The CDs and DVDs are often quite good. The most recent DVD was a cartoon version of the Nutcracker, narrated by Leslie Nielsen and Eric Idle, and I have a 2 disk yoga DVD set, among others.
So yes, I do see a place for newspapers in the long term, not for their unbelievable news, but for the goodies they can provide along the way.
I work at a local-level newspaper, and it’s the only one based out of my town. There are others in the area that have a minor competative level with us, but for the most part, we’re the only gig in town.
While we do, of course, pay a huge amount of attention to our print edition, we pay nearly as much attention to our on-line edition, where all of our content (minus things like Annie’s Mailbox and horoscopes and comics, which we only have permission to use once a day) is offered free of charge to our readers. We make a HUGE profit on our on-line ads; about as much as we do our print edition (for a newspaper, this is a big deal). This is because we can sell essentially an unlimited amount of ads (rotating banners, etc.) that reach a specific target group (ninety percent of the people who access our Web site are under 30, the age group deemed “most affected by advertising,” by advertising professionals). We also offer exclusive Web-only content on our Web site. One of the things I’m in charge of at our paper is video - I go out and film small clips of interviews with reporters, local events, and breaking news, and then I edit them and put them on our site. We conduct polls on the site, and offer a blog-style comment system on stories, Letters to the Editor, editorial pieces, polls and video. We’ve dumped a lot of effort into our site and it’s paying off - 20 percent of our readership visits the site, enough to rake in quite a lot of dough as far as advertising goes. We require readers to register to read the site, but not pay.
Some newspapers have just accepted that the future of print journalism is going to be the Internet. There will always be a market for print newspapers, because things just don’t look as cool clipped off an Internet printout - if, say, your child was featured in the paper, or there was an obituary for a loved one. But the market IS declining, and some papers are taking advantage of the new medium. The others will go away eventually. With the Internet, you get the best of both worlds - individual hits are counted so you don’t have to have a paying subscriber base and still get Advertising money, and readers get free news. The money you pay toward your subscription doesn’t count much toward the newspaper’s profit anyway.
~Tasha
A couple of things to consider:
At least in Western society, no mass medium has ever eliminated another medium entirely. Books, newspapers, motion pictures, mass mailings, radio and television continue to co-exist with the Internet.
Second, while the Internet is ideal for reaching a widely scattered audience, it has no inherent advantage in reaching a tightly grouped audience. I’d argue that having a newspaper delivered directly to my house (either by a carrier or by mail) is at least as convenient as turning on my computer, logging on and going to my favorite web site.
That the Internet will transform newspapers is a given. Newspapers have already been transformed by radio and, later, television.
Overall, I generally agree with Jonathan Chance. Newspapers that serve community interests will survive.
I saw that the other morning and I immediately thought, “JC’s gonna love this article.”
Still, somebody is going to have to cover the national and international stories, and it’s important (as our current set of wars have demonstrated) that they be covered reasonably well, by skeptical reporters who are going to do a bit more than transcribing the words of Senior Administration Officials and putting them into a story.
I will confess that I’m a bit nervous about whether the economics of the news biz will support much of that in the medium-term future.
Nice to know you’re thinking of me, RT!
I understand your concerns with such top-level coverage. But I think we’ll see a continuation of the trend for many years. We’ll have a couple of national/international ‘papers of record’ a la the NYT, the WP, and some others and the smaller ones will continue to resort to AP to keep their ‘national level’ credibility or abandon that entirely.
It’s just simply a fact that, on a day-to-day basis, what happens down the street or the days weather has more impact on a persons life than events in Iraq. A person might be interested in events overseas but whether to dress for snow hits that person where they live (literally).
So those ‘national’ level papers will continue to have a web division of power and gravitas while it will matter less for the smaller papers.