Do the Dead Know They Are Dead?

"Newspapers must win online, or face a future of painful contraction." So stated Winning Online - A Manifesto, published in September by Editor & Publisher, a publication that bills itself as America's Oldest Journal Covering The Newspaper Industry.

It went on to say, "Newspaper industry leaders are frogs in a pot. The water’s starting to boil, and it’s time to jump. Only 19 percent of 18-34 year olds read a daily newspaper; 44 percent of them go to a web news portal. Broadband penetration has reached 57%. The blogosphere is doubling every 5.5 months. Search provides instant access to the world’s information. User-generated content has turned the authority model of institutional media on its head. Peer-to-peer networks, tag clouds and reputation engines are fundamentally changing how people engage with content and communications."

It is obvious that members of the NOW generation, as well as the hightech-savvy among the older generation, are more likely to agree immediately. A reflection of this can best be seen in the many comments the appearance of a portion of the above E&P piece prompted on the blog of Microsoft's Emerging Business Team blogger Don Dodge, after he stated, "In the past I subscribed to Forbes, Fortune, Inc, Red Herring, Venture, Computer World, Computer Reseller News, Byte, and Time. I also subscribed to The Wall Street Journal and my local newspaper. Now I subscribe to none of them. I get my news online."

Before you pooh-pooh this as the hollow words of some techie (which Don is most probably not), do pause to think that Microshaft is about money. Its Emerging Business team must be looking hard at trends of all industries to know where to make inroads, where to invest, what to grab, who to target.

Bob Walsh, reader of that blog, commented

"Like a very bad car accident you drive by slowly, shocked by the blood and gore, there's actually two near-fatalities on the information superhighway today: 1. Traditional journalism. The mood of most newsrooms today is one decidedly gallows humor. There are approximately one half as many reporters in America today as there was a decade ago. Reporters are caught between the desire to glitz up the news, the need to dumb it down for an increasingly undereducated market, and their corporate masters who demand ever-improving profit margins forever and amen. 2. The second casualty is the idea of local. Local hasn't been doing too hot for about the last hundred years, but the Net is providing the final nail in coffin: I have more in common with people in the UK, New York, and hundreds of other places than I have with my next-door neighbors. And I can get a hold them quicker. Newspapers are a sinking ship; the captains of industry still refuse to see the icebergs ahead. The big question is whether reporters are going to go down when the ship, or realize that they no longer need newspapers to do their job."

Gerald Buckley, another reader, pitched in with: "I think the model is slowly (and painfully for the print-minded) turning a new, more efficient leaf. Once the print consumers are flushed from our ranks (die or convert) then it will fait accompli."

An opposing POV came from someone called LayZ (Hmmm. Could that be the problem?): "...the form factor of an electronic device for reading anything longer than 5-10 minutes is intolerable for me. Nothing will replace the ability to hold a document, periodical, or book in my hand and read it, refer back to it, annotate it. Throw it in the corner for future reference ... And there is no way I'm EVER taking my PC device into the bathroom!"

The objections raised by LayZ, will all be sorted out fairly soon ... with digital paper, better form factors, flexible screens, and other technological innovations. Some already have. As Kevin Tofel points out on the same page: "The few magazines I actually still subscribe to are digital editions simply because I can store them without wasting closet space, plus I can annotate them or even clip them with notes into OneNote, Evernote and the like, which makes them searchable."

In wi-fi enabled homes (a fast-growing phenomena, even in our city, as Broadband rates and Wireless Modem costs reduce and more than one member of the family begins to own computers and wants to go online from separate locations), I know several people who do take their laptops to the loo. One customer with a laptop surprised and amused the staff at T2F by asking if the free WiFi (Thank you, MaxCom!) was accessible from the toilet :-)

Lest I be accused of relying too much on one kind of source and thought-pool, here's more:

Marsha Geller (Editor at Large of iMedia Connection) has been covering the interactive advertising industry for nearly a decade. She quotes a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism which says that 2005 may go down in history as "the year when journalism in print began to die." Marsha adds that the report base[d] that ominous ruling on events such as newsroom staff cuts, scandals, downward spiraling stock prices, declining circulation, and frustrated investors [...]

BTW, if these people sound like near-techies because of their fields of work, do remember that not all techies are anti-newspapers. Visit the post Will the Internet Kill Newspapers for a sampling of views of one such community on the Palm Addict website, where - for example - Kris Gainsforth writes, "Just like books, I don't think that electronic means will replace the newspaper. The tactile feeling of reading a newspaper just cannot be duplicated by a Palm, no matter how cool it is. ;-)" ... and jvburthingy says, "I don't think the internet will kill newspapers. After all, TV didn't kill radio."

The State of the News Media 2006 (a very large report but exceedingly readable for anyone deeply interested in the media) has some interesting graphs and charts that tell their own story. Let me share a couple.

I have no intention through these graphs, let me hastily add, of turning this into a 'blogs vs. print' debate - already done to death (a trifle too emotionally by the print-supporters) elsewhere on this and many other blogs. That the newspapers (and print journalism, as an obvious corollary) are in big trouble is NOT due to the internet and blogs, alone, for sure. There are countless other factors, two of which can be seen in the next two charts.

Warren ("no one has followed the newspaper business as closely as we have for as long as we have—50 years or more.") Buffet, investor and philanthropist (he gave away over 80% of his fortune to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation), in a Hypergene interview stated:

"People will always want to be entertained and informed. But people just have two eyeballs, and there are only 24 hours in a day. Fifty or 60 years ago, media for most people consisted of the local movie theater, radio, and the local newspaper. Now people have a variety of ways of being informed faster (if not necessarily better), and have more entertainment options, too. But no one has figured out a way to increase the time available to watch entertainment. Whenever more competitors enter a business, the economics of that business tends to deteriorate. Newspapers are still highly profitable, but returns are falling. The size of the audience for network TV is declining. For years, cable TV was thought to operate in its own world, but that’s changing. Few businesses get better with more competitors. The outlook for newspapers is not great."

For a while now, some relatively smaller newspapers - more concerned about their future than the giant media conglomerates - are beginning to take note of this phenomena, and articles like Are Newspapers Dying can now be seen voicing such observations as, "Newspaper readership is something of a function of age. If you're 50 or older (hello to all those baby boomers), you're still reading newspapers, and usually four-five days a week. If you're under 50, and definitely if you're under 30, you're a lot less likely to read a newspaper every day of the week. Younger folks turn to the Web, and all of us use multiple media sources for our news and information." (Rockford Register Star).

I found Sandy Berger's piece, Newspapers in The Digital World, to be a really interesting read.

So far, though, and for a host of reasons - the chief among them being issues of access, lack of local language internet content of any value in countries like ours, the absence of more than a handful of known names writing for the new media (and, even more, of the public being aware of the 'cyber presence' of those who do), coupled with the stop-gap and utterly ludicrous idea of publishing digital look-alike 'copies' of the print edition of major newspapers that use none of the new media's numerous strengths - has kept the waves from drowning the industry. But, in the end, the story of King Canute is worth keeping in mind.