Way back in the early days of the dot-com boom, I had a conversation with a publisher of a small sports magazine. He published twice a month, actually doing the mailing himself. He had something like 10,000 subscribers so the mailing was no small task, but he had more time than money. He would pick up the issue from the printer, it was a small newspaper style magazine, and then apply the mailing labels.
Obviously, he hated this task and figured he could eliminate it by going on-line. Newspapers were already shoveling their content on-line and all the smart people said it was the future. The logic seems impenetrable. The savings from printing and mailing would more than make up for the lose of ad dollars. Eventually, on-line ads would add more revenue to the mix.
That’s not what happened. The number of people who made the switch was about 10% of his subscriber base. I think he said he peaked at about 1200 on-line subscribers. These were all subscribers to the dead tree version. He picked up only a handful of new readers, even when he started giving away free content as a teaser. For reasons he could never explain, the digital audience was smaller than the analog audience.
This story on the newspaper websites offers similar data.
For a long time, people assumed the web was the future of newspapers.
They figured readers would transition to papers’ websites when they began abandoning their print editions. They thought audiences for papers’ digital side would soar.
But just as newspaper advertisers don’t appear to be replacing their print ads with digital ones, print newspaper readers aren’t transitioning to newspapers’ websites in this digital age.
A new research paper finds that over the past eight years the websites of 51 major metropolitan newspapers have not on average seen appreciable readership gains, even as print readership falls.
The average reach of a newspaper website within the paper’s market has gone from 9.8 percent in 2007 to 10 percent in 2015. So in your typical top-50 market, the leading daily’s online audience would average just 10 percent of the market’s readership.
At the same time, print readership has fallen from 42.4 percent in 2007 to 28.5 percent in 2015
That’s a steep decline for sure, but it shows just how much larger print readership is versus online.
I think part of this is due to the difference in what is required of the reader. Newspapers and magazines delivered to your door are actively engaging readers. It turns out that those delivery fees and print costs drove revenue. The customer did nothing but pay the bill. The content was delivered to him via the miracle of the delivery boy or postman. Until it is consumed, it’s right there in your house, reminding you to read it.
On-line content is a different experience. You have to go get it. The news site does not have a cheap way to grab your attention when you’re heading for the morning constitutional or having lunch. Plus, there are a billion sites to distract you while you are thinking about what to read. Websites rely on you, the consumer, to find them. They are not finding you. The result is fewer readers.
That’s part of it. The other part is newspapers in America have been awful for a long time. Our news media, in general, is crap. I read the British press because they do a better job covering America than the locals. I have found interesting local stories in the British tabs that are nowhere to be found in my local media. If you make a crap product, you’re not going to have a big audience.
The argument from newspapers is they are losing out to cable, but that’s baloney. They used to blame talk radio. Before that it was network news. The fact is newspaper circulations have been falling for over forty years. The birth of New Journalism seems to have ushered in a general decline in the America media. Jamming the facts into a narrative turns into propaganda quickly and people can tolerate only so much of it.
There’s a also a market issue. In the 1950’s, a small town would have two or three papers. New York City had something like 20 daily papers. Then you had multiple editions of the paper. In the 60’s and 70’s we saw a consolidation and many cities ended up with one paper. Monopoly enterprises always decline in quality and eventually succumb to runaway cost problems. That’s what happened to newspapers. Paying a columnist six figures for three columns a week is absurd.
The ironic thing about the technological revolution is we may see some “dead” technologies rise from the grave simply because there’s no better way to do things like sell news or music. A new British paper just started and it has no website. It is an old-style dead tree paper. If this works, how long before musicians start selling their songs on vinyl again, forgoing the digital format entirely?
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Is it just me or are newspapers the slowest loading sites on the net? Who’s got the time to wait for all those advert, faceboot, counter links to embed? Screw ’em.
You raise a number of good points regarding the decline of old-fashioned newspaper readership versus little or no gains on those same papers’ websites. But you should also keep in mind that for those below the age of, say, 30 years are people who grew up in a world where the newspaper probably wasn’t attractive to them in their formative years as an information source. They grew up watching their parents watch cable news, e.g. CNN, MSNBC, etc. and the newspaper was something that (maybe) go delivered to their home on Sunday. Today, people between the ages of 18-30 turn to the internet for their news of what’s going on in the world. Regardless of educational status or background, millennials think (or were coached to think) of newspapers as a dated technology and in some instances as environmentally unfriendly. As older consumers of traditional newspapers die off, they are no being replaced by new consumers with anticipated lifespans that promise another forty years of buying newspapers. In addition, one can carry the news on your portable electronic device, e.g. smart phone, pad, what have you. Between ubiquitous cellphone service and Wifi available out everywhere, young people can access news the way their parents or grandparents did carrying the traditional paper.
Speaking of the news biz, I was just reading a summary (in the WaPo) of the whole Gay Talese flap. It comes off like a bunch of dim, schizophrenic high-schoolers arguing over who has the most bitchen’ put down of the weird kid in the class. I write “schizophrenic” because I couldn’t find the merest gossamer thread of logic or consistency in the entire story. As far as I could tell (again difficult due to the total lack of logic), one of the things the journalistic rabble is upset over is that Talese doesn’t have a twitter account so they can’t beat him down directly with their 140-character blatherings.
Tell me again why anyone would pay for this?
“how long before musicians start selling their songs on vinyl again, forgoing the digital format entirely?”
Your voice to Gods ear. The Wall Street Journal (going downhill rapidly under Murdock) really can’t be read at home, at least in my area. In my suburb of Boston, all the print editions suffer from unfixable delivery issues. I had to cancel in the winter because the idiot continued to toss the paper onto the driveway, covered with snow it choked the snowthrower. My neighbor still gets the Globe delivered, last week the paper landed square in a puddle, the flimsy plastic wrapper did a good job of holding the water inside. Made a heavy little brick when I brought it up to her front door. Face it, for newspaper delivery the ten year old boy on a bike can’t be beat. Of course there’s that minimum wage problem again.
The attitude of the WSJ when I canceled was interesting; since they owed me about twenty missed issues I asked for a refund, their response was that they would enable twenty days of online access to the Journal after I canceled in compensation. Pity I didn’t pay them in a digital photo of the cash in the first place.
The death of big city newspapers is different than the death of newspapers. I could be wrong, but the small and independent newspapers I read seem to be perking along OK — though I haven’t seen their balance sheets. I have a place I’m fixing up for retirement in the Northern Neck of Virginia, where there are two or three small-circulation local newspapers, weekly publications. They all seem to sell well at the local stores. In additio, there are a number of ad-driven “free” papers that provide a mix of local events, local ads, and feature story type “news.” These all seem to be surviving. It may simply be that in today’s information age, *all* news is niche news. The key may be finding the niche and stopping trying to be the “journal of record.” That’s what I sorta see in magazines as well — at least with those mags that seem to stick around. TIME is gone, but Woodwrker’s Journal seems to be doing OK.
Watch out for Gannett when you shop for that local paper. Gannet owns dozens of them. It’s easier to spot a Gannett rag lately – they’ve started stuffing them with whole USA Today sections.
This post may have come a day or two early. I see the Boston Globe (the Z Man’s local rag?) will make a fake front page replete with “news” of President Donald Trump’s expulsion orders of illegal immigrants and all the accompanying woes. What a joke. If the public haven’t already given up on the mainstream news press, this may be the final nail in the coffin for them. I hope he sues them into bankruptcy.
Boston’s ‘Paper of Record’…my aunt Fanny.
You got it backwards: its Boston’s “Record of Paper”!
How long before musicians start selling on vinyl again? It’s already happening. I’m planning to do the same myself. And the “bonus tracks” will be on the LP, not on the CD. So there. :-p
I know a few guitar players who only use to the vacuum tube amps. They also swear that music is better on vinyl. I think their argument is that the lack of precision in analog allows the musician to do things they cannot do with digital.
Neil Young has been working to improve digital sound. He claims it is not the same and regrets that he converted his music to digital.
And just about every white guy knows Neil Young is “GOD”!
Well, I was going to say “If you don’t like Neil Young, it may not matter. “He did seem knowledgeable about it.
It isn’t just the crappiness and lies, it is also the huge number of alternatives.
Newspapers were never about information, they were about helping to handle the real problem of the first world – boredom. Most people read the damn things to be entertained, to be not bored, and not to get information, which most people loathe entirely. Well, except for sports stats. The newspapers were never better than mediocre at much of that, and now are even worse – run by incompetent politicized hacks. Coming soon, NHL stats weighted by how many black guys are on the hockey teams. You doubt me? Just wait.
Netflix, YouTube et al, Kindle et al, blogs, porn, video games – why would I waste my time giving a fuck about what Krauthammer writes or what some ill educated dweeb writes about the facts of some local situation, in complete ignorance?
Instapundit has it: Disintermediation. There is a much smaller barrier between unboring stuff and us and the newspapers are unable to compete, containing mostly boring content. Even their never ending lies are boring.
On-line, when the BS meter goes off, you can be gone, immediately, no questions asked. Or if you suspect BS, never call up the site in the first place. It takes more than a moment of frustration over the BS in print to unsubscribe. Instead the paper keeps coming, but it gets read less and less. Eventually, you don’t renew it. Then the paper’s rep calls and offers a year delivered for $10 or something. OK, why not? So, of the people still subscribing, how many are at cheapo subscription rates, and what percentage of those papers generally go from driveway to recycling without ever being looked at?
Maybe it’s tripe like this that turns people off-https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2016/04/05/dont-laugh-i-have-a-serious-reason-for-raising-my-cats-gender-neutral/
Hey! That was one of the better written articles in the DC Compost that week!!!
This is not a shock. Once you realize you’re dealing with American Pravda, you seek alternate means of news and information.
“American Pravda.” Perfect.
Sure it’s all left wing agitprop, but is it just me? Or has anyone else noticed that nobody under 40 EVER reads a newspaper?
That’s the key trend.
I don’t think they read anything.
Much of what is published as “news” is written as either editorial or pure speculative opinion. There is not much in the way of actual fact finding or investigative journalism and much of it seems to be based on someone’s Twitter or Facebook posting or some sensationalized video clip. To add insult to injury, the event is written by people with a literary competency level of a high school student lacking any sort of critical thinking skills.
Newspapers and periodicals in general, missed the rise of curation. Why subscribe to the Washington Poat whe you can amble over to Real Clear and get a curated digest across a hundred publications?
When I worked in newspapers, we were all aware that the readership was literally dying off. Young people weren’t interested in the paper, and the old ones were not going to last. of course, older people liked the Hatch, Match and Dispatch columns, particularly the latter as they could see who they knew who they wouldn’t be meeting again. But even that began to shrink as younger people saw no reason to announce their marriage or their children (you might even conclude that unmarried single mothers had absolutely no reason to announce the arrival of little Dwayne as there was a fair chance it wasn’t Wayne who was the dad.)
The papers I worked on had a large revenue based on ‘Want Ads’ which was the trendy name for classified lineage ads but that fell as people began to want to buy new (Ikea, etc) furniture and not want some faded or chipped old furniture. The old stuff might last lot longer but the likes of Ikea delivered — for a hefty price — but you didn’t need to hire van to go and collect old Mrs Dobbin’s teak dining table. Nobody wanted old tat any more when you could have smart, new and put-it-together yourself, even if it wouldn’t last long. You could always go back next year and get a cheap, bright and new whatever.
Any survey we did showed people were far more interested in ‘reading’ the paper for the night’s TV guide, and I used to estimate that the ‘life’ of the paper was no more than an hour a day. We used to joke that today’s papers were tomorrow’s garbage/dustbin liners but people started buying plastic bags for that and wrapping up the potato peelings in newspaper went out of fashion.
Worse was the fact that newsagents were not only disappearing but refused to home deliver the paper. The papers I worked on sought new outlets but I know of at least one case where the Chinese take-out food shop agreed to have five papers on a sale-or-return basis each day. Not only didn’t sell any but started sending back seven or eight copies. Plus there was a fanatical urge by local councils to ban parking: if people couldn’t stop their car and rush into a newsagent but had to keep driving they saw no reason to buy the paper at all.
When tinterwebz came along it offered a new market, of sorts, but everyone wanted it free. I worked on the fledgeling web version for one newspaper but it was impossible to get editorial interested then: they may have been young revolutionaries but they had no vision of change other than to stay firmly in a union and tell each other that it was all Thatcher’s fault, even though she had been out of power for half-a-dozen years by then.
All in all the decline of papers was a sad thing. We kidded ourselves that we were selling papers but increasingly the paper relied on handouts with the papers to stimulate interest. The day we got a deal to distribute a promotional can of beer with each copy of the day’s paper boosted circulation to dizzy heights for one day but left the streets littered with discarded papers as well as empty cans. If we needed any further proof we were irrelevant that was surely it.
Of course, since I left the newspaper business I have seen the rise of ‘opinion” masquerading as news, so unless you are one of the faithful — and that has to be lefty zealot — there is no point in reading yet another frothy but boring diatribe on global warming. Advertising was declining and despite what journalists said, their excitable articles were merely padding round the ads, which were getting fewer. (Incidentally, it wasn’t just readers who didn’t read the paper: an editor I knew complained that even his own writers didn’t read what they produced.)
Oh yes, and the price kept going up too. The few papers that are being sold began to require bank notes and not simply pocket change to purchase. Even a free can of booze begins to become expensive…
‘expensive’…
$4 for the WSJ now at the news-stand. I’d have to agree.
On your mentioning IKEA: my son spent last summer in Geneva Switzerland ,training in for his new job. While he is well off financially, but not rich, he observed that in Europe, IKEA is considered better than average furniture for its price for the average European family. Gotta remember the average German GDP is about the same as the GDP for folks living in Mississippi, poorest of the US fifty.
One of my favorite books is Mute Evidence a book about the cattle mutilation scare in the 70’s. The authors went into it expecting to find cover ups and conspiracies, but instead discovered that journalists are a bunch of lazy scumbags and money-grubbing fabulists a who don’t check their sources and can’t be bothered to take the two or three hours (in those days) it would take to locate a nationally known subject matter expert. And that was before the J-school revolution.
The book is out of print, but you can buy it used online for $.96.
When I called the NY Times in 2000 to cancel my subscription, the gal on the phone asked me why I was cancelling. I told her because the Times didn’t even pretend any more that it was an objective newspaper, that it had become an out-and-out propaganda sheet. There was a pause. I asked the gal if she was writing that down. She said no, she heard it all the time.
“The other part is newspapers in America have been awful for a long time. Our news media, in general, is crap. I read the British press because they do a better job covering America than the locals. I have found interesting local stories in the British tabs that are nowhere to be found in my local media. If you make a crap product, you’re not going to have a big audience.”
It in a nutshell. when your local paper makes stuff up out of whole cloth it’s even worse.
Speaking of dead stuff, very few people — and NO journos — realize just how new “journalism” really is. The first American journalism school opened in 1908; I’d wager it wasn’t until the late 60s / early 70s that having a degree of any kind, let alone a “journalism” degree, became standard in American newsrooms. Not coincidentally, that’s when the myth of the “unbiased,” “apolitical” journalist took hold. American newspapers used to be nakedly partisan; it wasn’t until the 70s that absurdities like the Mudville Republican-Democrat-Picayune started appearing.
I’d wager that openly partisan papers, especially conservative-leaning ones, could equal the conglomerates’ market share with very little effort. Cf. the difference between Fox and MSNBC — right now, Fox has a guaranteed floor, since they’re the only ones chasing the “not-completely-liberal” market. MSNBC, on the other hand, has a tiny ceiling, since there’s only so much more liberalism to add to the product all the other nets peddle.
Really, the only thing standing in the way of the Mudville Conservative Gazette cornering half the local news market is a labor shortage — since even the majority of college grads can’t write a coherent sentence these days, you can’t hire glorified stenographers straight out of high school at minimum wage. A college kid would expect to be able to pay back his student loans on his Gazette salary. Plus — college kids being the special widdle snowflakes they are — he’d want to “make a difference,” instead of just taking dictation at the city council meeting.