Who Killed the Newspaper?

Over two decades ago, before the Internet was the global network system it is now, I remember a conversation with one of the heads of our magazine publishing firm. As he took me on a private tour of the rows of our block long state-of-the-art printers, he was so proud that digital files with its changable layout could be fed from our editing terminals directly into magazine print.

"This is the future", he proudly screamed over the noise of the machinery. "Ultimately, readers want their news immediately and they want news customized to their own interests. This is the technnology that will allow us to quickly print a customizable magazine one day."

He was two-thirds right. He did not forsee the birth of the Internet and the advantages that would provide.

That day has come. In the developed world, more and more readers are slipping from print to electronic media, where most businesses and families are now plugged in. Business trade journals have not been immune from this trend. The numbers bear out that readers increasingly understand that electronic media has so many more advantages. To name a few, it has:

• worldwide news, anywhere, at the speed of light
• customized news to meet the reader's needs
• interactivity with leading experts
• ability to learn what the reader wants
• enlargable font to make reading easier
• software tools to aid a reader make decisions
• and much, much more

The Economist leads this week's edition with this profound question, "Who Killed the Newspaper?" It starts by answering why news reporting is migrating online. Simply, the Net lends itself to a nation that can converse with itself. It is Blue MauMau's observation that nothing allows a nation to talk to itself more than social media, or news organized, contributed and written by the community -- an army of citizen journalists.

“A GOOD newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself,” mused Arthur Miller in 1961. A decade later, two reporters from the Washington Post wrote a series of articles that brought down President Nixon and the status of print journalism soared. At their best, newspapers hold governments and companies to account. They usually set the news agenda for the rest of the media. But in the rich world newspapers are now an endangered species. The business of selling words to readers and selling readers to advertisers, which has sustained their role in society, is falling apart (see article).

Of all the “old” media, newspapers have the most to lose from the internet. Circulation has been falling in America, western Europe, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand for decades (elsewhere, sales are rising). But in the past few years the web has hastened the decline. In his book “The Vanishing Newspaper”, Philip Meyer calculates that the first quarter of 2043 will be the moment when newsprint dies in America as the last exhausted reader tosses aside the last crumpled edition. That sort of extrapolation would have produced a harrumph from a Beaverbrook or a Hearst, but even the most cynical news baron could not dismiss the way that ever more young people are getting their news online. Britons aged between 15 and 24 say they spend almost 30% less time reading national newspapers once they start using the web.

It's not just the written word going online. We know in publishing that advertisers go where readers can be reached. Again, the Economist...

Classified ads, in particular, are quickly shifting online. Rupert Murdoch, the Beaverbrook of our age, once described them as the industry's rivers of gold—but, as he said last year, “Sometimes rivers dry up.” In Switzerland and the Netherlands newspapers have lost half their classified advertising to the internet.  

The budget for international and national news coverage is shrinking but that is increasingly being replaced by the direct contributions online of experts and citizen journalists (aka bloggers). 

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Other readings: The Giants Move, What It Means to America's Small Business