They are supposed to be toast but newspapers are actually remarkably resiliant. Alex Linde has asked Why Read Newspapers and answers: ‘marketing’. He suggests they have no future. I think that is only partly true and the real story is elsewhere: Why Are They Still So Popular?
I often write the Media Guardian’s monthly article on Newspaper sales figures. The story has stayed pretty consistent over the last few years with annual falls of about 5% but that is from a high base of readership and revenue in the early 1980s.
Even if you put aside newspapers sales growth globally and especially in places like India, they are still a big media product. Considering the competition from TV, magazine, radio and now the Internet, it is amazing that they still sell in their 100,000s or millions in the UK and that they completely dominate the news agenda.
In the West newspaper sales have been declining from way before the Internet, but they remained generally profitable or at least sustainable. Now the real economic crisis for newspapers is simply one of advertising. It is going online. And rarely to news.
Their relative continued popularity with the public is partly because of tradition and legacy and partly convenience. They are a better package of information than ever before. And not everyone wants everything all the time right now. Most people don’t live their news consumption lives in every instant. Real people have other stuff to do, so don’t mind if their paper is a little out of date.
But the real reason for their relative popularity is entertainment. Just as I find Twitter fun and stimulating, so newspaper readers enjoy the diverse experience of reading a paper. And they value the sense of community. If I am a middle Englander then I get a warm glow from the sense of identity I share with the Daily Mail. Online, newspapers find that harder to achieve, while a blogger usually offers a narrower, if more intense and interactive experience.
In the end, there is a lot of value left in newspapers in a journalistic and even business and social sense. They still earn far more than online news. It’s just they don’t make a profit (but neither does YouTube). I am amazed that no national UK newspaper has gone bust recently, even though nearly all are operating at a loss.
So they are not toast yet, though the smell of burning is starting to drift out of the kitchen.
Charlie – I have not bought a newspaper in the last four years or more and I never will again. If I have time to read, I’ll pick a specialist magazine (I still subscribe to The Eye and various sports mags and, if on that long train journey with no work to do, would go for The Economist, the New Yorker or The Atlantic). Of course, I read newspaper material, but online only.
When I have come across a newspaper in hard copy as a single artefact, I’m afraid that, far from being entertained, I am depressed by the facile content, abysmal research and lacklustre writing – compare with the mags named above. Maybe I’m outside the target market, but it’s strange how I’m in it for online and mags.
It gives me no pleasure to write this, as I grew up in a home which always had newspapers strewn around and read by all of us. Never again.
Hi Gary,
Three million NotW readers can’t be wrong…er…can they?
Likewise, I don’t buy a paper except if I am on a train or at the weekend when I fancy something different.
But plenty of others still do – they call it legacy media…
cheers
Charlie
Count how many people under the age of thirty that you see reading a newspaper on the tube – one that they have paid for. The legacy is in its last generation.
Is that 3M figure right? Does it include the giveaways? It’s still a lot granted, but the decline in print newspapers looks irreversible to me.
The three million figure is about right, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulation, but on the other hand the circulation of the tabloids is artificially inflated to a massive degree – especially NotW and the Sun – through their giveaways and price cuts.
I suspect that Charlie is right, that the real problem isn’t yet one of declining circulation, it is one of advertising. This is why Murdoch and others have been making noises about recouping their losses through charging for online content. I’ll believe in the success of that from the point of view of non-specialist, non-magazine media when I see it.
That said, the complete gutting of newsrooms of as many staff as can be binned, the hollowing out of key teams of investigative journalists and the increasingly blunt enforcement of editorialization even in news articles is driving people away. I don’t take a paper anymore – I do the odd Times crossword when it is in a coffee shop or on a train, but read it? Bugger that.
I imagine that, with these attitudes, newspapers are storing up trouble for the future. Millions spent on offers instead of actual news, hardly makes the most compelling argument to buy what Gary has summed up neatly as, “facile content, abysmal research and lacklustre writing”. This is as much true for the Guardian and the Independent (always catering to niche markets) as for the tabloids.
On the other hand, the human race seems to have a wonderful talent for accommodating itself to even the worst of conditions – so perhaps the next generation won’t grow up without newspapers, they’ll merely grow up thinking that all this rubbish about celebrities and so forth counts as ‘news’.
Its pretty obvious what has taken place. Newspapers have become a victim of companies finally being able to grasp the true value of buying space in their pages. Surprise, surprise the space turns out to be worth a lot less then newspapers have been selling it for. Advertising has always been a magicians game.
Why?
The internet gave companies a way of measuring just how effective advertising is. They were able to get a breakdown of stats. Companies learned fast that in many instances they’d been pissing money away blindly doing advertising in magazines and newspapers, thus the pull back on spend in this area.
The whole newspaper business is built on the sand and like the music industry is struggling to re-invent itself.
It will have to though.
Next five years are going to be fascinating. In a sense we’re going to learn much more about the true value of news, and its not going to be pretty.
Here’s a piece from my PR blog asking, and (hopefully) answering, the question whether the ultra-modern “social” media really are all that different to poor old “mass” media. It puts the case for the defence of old media; and, Charlie, your vision of the industry’s future gets an honourable mention:
http://paulseaman.eu/2009/07/is-the-social-media-really-social-or-media/