Here’s an answer to a question I posted a little while back in Linked-In while playing with their new questions and answers feature. It was rated ‘good answer’ by the questioner, whatever that means.
Future of the Newspaper Industry?
How long will the newspaper business continue as it is today? Circulation has been decreasing in every major metro area within the U.S. (at least) for the last 15 years. When does the circulation drop below a point where the editorial, classifieds, and advertising models collapse and our vehicle news needs radical innovation? Perhaps this innovation already exists with RSS, blogging, and online news search and alerts – but it seems to me just the beginning. I think it more likely that trends in citizen journalism, multi-user editorial, effective content targetting will need to grow to create sufficient online news capabilities.
My answer
1: Newspapers on newsprint are just a delivery mechanism for the content and advertising. The eventual endgame is clear – it’s clearly more efficient to deliver content electronically than through a process involving trees, big industrial plants to make and print on paper, and transportation/distribution to shift the same.
2: Several niches will survive for longer, and even prosper. These include newspapers aimed at: older people, commuters, niche content markets (economist, WSJ), papers of record (NYTimes, WSJ), communities and poorer regions and economies. I’m unsure of the reaction of highbrow (Times) versus lowbrow (Sun), but there is bound to be one.
3: Newspaper companies will scramble to retain their customers online, and most will probably make it. Incumbents need to be already invested online, and not just in the content game if they can. The big newspapers (NYTimes etc.) will capture an increasing share of the general news, so other’s will need to focus on local news (and advertising) and syndicate the rest – perhaps through more direct partnerships. The big online disrupters, such as eBay and Google, have been working from the back of the newspaper to the front, and newspapers risk losing it all if they do not get their online revenue models working.
The endgame is a combination of the best features on on and offline – e.g. I should expect to read excerpts from my favorite and relevant blogs in my newspaper today, so that the experience between on and offline is seamless. Eventually I expect my newsprint newspaper to be some sort of robust automatically updating product that I can carry around with with me, yet still read at the size of my choice – from full size newspaper on the kitchen table to a paperback novel size while standing in the train. How long will this take? Technology-wise I’d say within 5 years, but society will take perhaps another 5 for the complete shift.
Other answers
Other points raised were manifold – some interesting ones were
– The largest USA papers are small internationally – biggest USA Today is only #13 globally, & just 8 out of the top 100 are from the USA. The top 5 are all from Japan.
– People don’t want (or need) to pay for news any more.
– Nothing beats a Sunday paper to read in the sun, or a commuter paper to read on the train.
– Radio or TV didn’t kill newspapers – why should online?
Lance Wiggs 