It may be premature to write an obituary for newspapers, but it's hardly stupid to discuss their marked decline. As Ad Age reported recently, advertising spend by top 100 advertisers declined 11.4% and 8.7%, respectively, for national and local newspapers, from 2006 to 2007. At the same time advertising spend by top 100 advertisers increased 33% on the internet. And these are not small numbers. If 2007-2008 growth figures are similar to 2006-2007, then top 100 advertisers' spending on the internet will nearly equal their total spending on local and national newspapers combined.
I expect newspaper publishers will adapt to these changing conditions, and that there will remain a very prominent role for professional journalists employed by big publishers. But the days of newsprint's dominance are surely numbered.
Steven Hodson
· 1 year ago
I agree that we will see newspapers adapt but just because ad dollars are increasing on internet advertising doesn't mean that newspapers are going to be dead in 10 years like the tech crowd would like us to believe. We are talking about a $45 billion - that's the big 'B' - industry with more market forces it is addressing than just the small section of the tecnology crowd. Whether it be environmental to delivery methods the industry is facing many challenges but it has time and most importantly money on its side.
Bill Dunphy
· 1 year ago
Hey Dan, You're last line suggests you're confusing audience with revenue. Newspaper's have (long ago) lost their dominance in the news and information market. They lost it, not to the almighty internets, but to... radio and especially television. Television is far and above the current dominant player in the news market. As for advertising, well, here too Newspapers lost their dominance a long time ago - and not to Craigslist. It was, again, to television. A look at Nielsen's Monitor-Plus ad data (Oct 2007) shows that for that month television (network, cable, local, Hispanic and syndicated) accounted for 68% of the total ad spend. Newspapers? (local, national,and Sunday supplements)? Newspapers accounted for a grand total of ... 6% share of the spend. So exactly which days of dominance are numbered? (This illustrates - as do most of the comments here - why professional journalists will continue to thrive: we're trained to research and present facts, not echoes we pick up inside the tech bubble...) Bill
xman
· 1 year ago
I think you mean elict rather than illict....
Steven Hodson
· 1 year ago
yes .. you are correct on that.
Chris
· 1 year ago
I think you made some great points until the last 2 paragraphs.
If a person cannot afford access to the Internet, it does not follow that this person is being "disenfranchised."
If a person can afford Internet access, but **by use of force** it was being prohibited, I think you would have an argument.
But lack of funds is an economic part of just about every person's life.
It would be silly for me to say that because of lack of funding, I'm being "disenfranchised" from owning a million dollar home, or a Rolls Royce....
It's just an economic reality, and no one is forcefully stopping me from earning either of these things.
Like I said, other than the very end, I enjoyed the post.
Steven Hodson
· 1 year ago
Chris,
But one has to look at the reasons that one cannot afford the access. I know myself I am typically one bill away from losing access on an almost continuous basis. I have seen my monthly bill go up twice since I first signed up with Bell. How many more increases can be dealt with before it become financially impossible to stay connected.
I understand the need for companies to make a profit but with the whole idea behind things like continuous information flow is that we have 24/7/365 access to the Internet. That access though is being controlled by companies that want to exert more and more control over the access and charge increasing amounts of money to gain that access.
That I would take as being disenfranchised. The arguement that lack of money is keeping you from a million dollar home or owning a Rolls Royce doesn't fly because neither of those are being billed as a neccessity of life - a utility - like the Internet is.
With the increasing reliance of access to the Internet to manage even the most mundane tasks of our daily lives being on the wrong side of the technological divide puts a growing segment of our society at a disadvantage - there is no escaping that fact.
Kay Ballard
· 1 year ago
A post graduate course in the art and purpose of controversy.
Steven Hodson
· 1 year ago
controversy or conversation :)
Marion
· 1 year ago
Wow. Wow. Wow. One of the most uninformed columns I've seen in a long, long time. You need to come down from your ivory tower, Hodson, because honey, you don't have a CLUE. Newspapers ARE dying. Their business model is antiquated. Their distribution model is antiquated. Vastly more Americans believe in flying saucers and Sept. 11 conspiracy theories than believe the mainstream news media is balanced or objective. I don't know who has less credibility, you or them!
Virginia
· 1 year ago
I wouldn't say the debate so much focused on whether or not mainstream news media is balanced or objective... it is apparent to everyone that it typically is not balanced. I do, however have faith in the fact that ours is a country based on long-standing industries and tradition, and people will fight tooth and nail before they gave up reading that morning's paper with a cup of coffee.
Marion, when you figure out a way to set up the entirety of the baby boomer generation and older with RSS feeds, Google News alerts and online accounts, you let us know. Until then, you'll have to figure out a way to pry the Wall Street Journal out of my stock broker father's vise-like grasp.
Steven Hodson
· 1 year ago
correct I never said anything in my post about the news - or the providers of it - being fair and balanced. That is a whole other topic of discussion.
Steven Hodson
· 1 year ago
Excuse me Marion but if anyone is living in an ivory tower it must be yourself. I think it is time that you put down the kool-aid and take a walk around in the real world for a little while.
Chris
· 1 year ago
This is a good article. I am constantly amazed at how often these tech "pundits" make comments like this forgetting that they live in a very very tiny bubble. Go ask your average U.S. Citizen who Robert Scoble is and they will give you a funny look.
Newspapers are indeed ripe for change, but they will, and will most likely survive...they may not exist exactly as we know them today but they will still be around, and most likely for many, many years to come.
gijs bos
· 1 year ago
Newspapers have two sources of revenue: advertising and subscriptions/sales.
Advertising in newspapers is only interesting for companies that don't measure ROI. Stated more subtly: hyper targetting, zero distribution cost and multivariate testing aren't easily ported to print.
Paying for news/analysis is from a previous century as can been seen by the rapid rise of free newspapers.
The only real benefit of newspapers is their format (print). However, tech evolves continiously and rapidly. Just look at the iPhones or the N95 and compare them to a 2001 phone. Anybody who thinks that reading from an iPhone built in 2015 isn't more comfortable than print just isn't thinking hard enough.
DavidG
· 1 year ago
LOL
Arguing over what the future might look like is stupid. Have you considered that you could both be right? Newspaper businesses could thrive even as the physical papers themselves stop publishing (offline.) To believe that some newspapers won't survive the move online is totally naive. And it's also naive to suggest that we'll always consume our news on physical paper.
ankesh
· 1 year ago
I'm not a frequent reader of Mashable, but maybe now I will be.. The article is well written and thought through comments.
My 2cents, clearly the newspaper industry is in a downward spiral, the question is how low will the current business model go and what will they do to offset that loss.
That's why I believe Hearst's CEO Ganzi left. The board wanted a bold move like Murdoch's for MySpace as opposed to smaller deals that Hearst were doing like Kaboddle.
If they can use their cash, their user base and brand and migrate it into new models of content distribution they will survive.
As for the physical newspaper surviving it will for many generations, it's hard to change human behaviour.
Metaprinter
· 1 year ago
Scoble on food, now that's a column that would have some merit -zing!. I hate it when that guy talks about newspapers. It is always some half-ass commentary.
@Bill Dunphy - you underestimate the craigslist phenomenon. I used to print ~24 pages of classifieds in our local paper only 6 years ago. Then craigslist made it into our market and people began using it. Now we are lucky to print 1 page of classifieds that's not a careerbuilder mashup. That's about a quarter million dollars of lost revenue PER DAY! Television didn't do this.
My personal opinion on the matter is that newspapers need to focus their product. Example1: the wall street journal is doing really well in print and online. why? It reports only on business and finance, no local sports scores here. Example2: the las vegas sun. they said f@ck the printed paper, hired bad ass developers, and went purely online. They're killin it in vegas.
All Comments
I expect newspaper publishers will adapt to these changing conditions, and that there will remain a very prominent role for professional journalists employed by big publishers. But the days of newsprint's dominance are surely numbered.
You're last line suggests you're confusing audience with revenue. Newspaper's have (long ago) lost their dominance in the news and information market. They lost it, not to the almighty internets, but to... radio and especially television. Television is far and above the current dominant player in the news market. As for advertising, well, here too Newspapers lost their dominance a long time ago - and not to Craigslist. It was, again, to television. A look at Nielsen's Monitor-Plus ad data (Oct 2007) shows that for that month television (network, cable, local, Hispanic and syndicated) accounted for 68% of the total ad spend. Newspapers? (local, national,and Sunday supplements)? Newspapers accounted for a grand total of ... 6% share of the spend.
So exactly which days of dominance are numbered?
(This illustrates - as do most of the comments here - why professional journalists will continue to thrive: we're trained to research and present facts, not echoes we pick up inside the tech bubble...)
Bill
If a person cannot afford access to the Internet, it does not follow that this person is being "disenfranchised."
If a person can afford Internet access, but **by use of force** it was being prohibited, I think you would have an argument.
But lack of funds is an economic part of just about every person's life.
It would be silly for me to say that because of lack of funding, I'm being "disenfranchised" from owning a million dollar home, or a Rolls Royce....
It's just an economic reality, and no one is forcefully stopping me from earning either of these things.
Like I said, other than the very end, I enjoyed the post.
But one has to look at the reasons that one cannot afford the access. I know myself I am typically one bill away from losing access on an almost continuous basis. I have seen my monthly bill go up twice since I first signed up with Bell. How many more increases can be dealt with before it become financially impossible to stay connected.
I understand the need for companies to make a profit but with the whole idea behind things like continuous information flow is that we have 24/7/365 access to the Internet. That access though is being controlled by companies that want to exert more and more control over the access and charge increasing amounts of money to gain that access.
That I would take as being disenfranchised. The arguement that lack of money is keeping you from a million dollar home or owning a Rolls Royce doesn't fly because neither of those are being billed as a neccessity of life - a utility - like the Internet is.
With the increasing reliance of access to the Internet to manage even the most mundane tasks of our daily lives being on the wrong side of the technological divide puts a growing segment of our society at a disadvantage - there is no escaping that fact.
Marion, when you figure out a way to set up the entirety of the baby boomer generation and older with RSS feeds, Google News alerts and online accounts, you let us know. Until then, you'll have to figure out a way to pry the Wall Street Journal out of my stock broker father's vise-like grasp.
Newspapers are indeed ripe for change, but they will, and will most likely survive...they may not exist exactly as we know them today but they will still be around, and most likely for many, many years to come.
Advertising in newspapers is only interesting for companies that don't measure ROI. Stated more subtly: hyper targetting, zero distribution cost and multivariate testing aren't easily ported to print.
Paying for news/analysis is from a previous century as can been seen by the rapid rise of free newspapers.
The only real benefit of newspapers is their format (print). However, tech evolves continiously and rapidly. Just look at the iPhones or the N95 and compare them to a 2001 phone. Anybody who thinks that reading from an iPhone built in 2015 isn't more comfortable than print just isn't thinking hard enough.
Arguing over what the future might look like is stupid. Have you considered that you could both be right? Newspaper businesses could thrive even as the physical papers themselves stop publishing (offline.) To believe that some newspapers won't survive the move online is totally naive. And it's also naive to suggest that we'll always consume our news on physical paper.
My 2cents, clearly the newspaper industry is in a downward spiral, the question is how low will the current business model go and what will they do to offset that loss.
That's why I believe Hearst's CEO Ganzi left. The board wanted a bold move like Murdoch's for MySpace as opposed to smaller deals that Hearst were doing like Kaboddle.
If they can use their cash, their user base and brand and migrate it into new models of content distribution they will survive.
As for the physical newspaper surviving it will for many generations, it's hard to change human behaviour.
@Bill Dunphy - you underestimate the craigslist phenomenon. I used to print ~24 pages of classifieds in our local paper only 6 years ago. Then craigslist made it into our market and people began using it. Now we are lucky to print 1 page of classifieds that's not a careerbuilder mashup. That's about a quarter million dollars of lost revenue PER DAY! Television didn't do this.
My personal opinion on the matter is that newspapers need to focus their product. Example1: the wall street journal is doing really well in print and online. why? It reports only on business and finance, no local sports scores here. Example2: the las vegas sun. they said f@ck the printed paper, hired bad ass developers, and went purely online. They're killin it in vegas.
Robert Ivan
Metaprinter.com