Newspapers Are Circling The Drain

January 8, 2009 on 12:48 pm | In Advertising, Journalism, Media, News, Newspapers | 4 Comments

Yes, that was the toilet you heard flushing on newspapers. We’ve talked about this topic often here at THINKing. Newspapers are in deep trouble. A handful of smart ones will survive. But most are either on their way out or they will morph into something different. eMarketer reports on the outlook for the newspaper industry. Based on eMarketer’s review, it’s time to call the funeral home,

There is no sugarcoating it. The outlook for newspaper publishers in the US is dismal. eMarketer estimates that newspaper advertising revenues declined 16.4% in 2008 to $37.9 billion.

“The current economic situation is making things tough across all media, but newspaper revenues are falling more than in any other major medium,” says Carol Krol, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report, Newspapers in Crisis: Migrating Online. “Even the former bulwark of newspaper revenues, classified advertising, is plummeting due to craigslist and other online alternatives.”

Newspapers have so many different problems that will be almost impossible for them to be the force they once were. They just aren’t relevant in a digital world. The print media has not figured out how to make money from their online presence, even though some of the major media have the most highly trafficked sites on the web. And their perceived liberal bias is losing them readers right and far right, not as much to the left.

What do you think will happen to newspapers? Will they survive in their current form? Come on, tell us what you think.

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  • Marc Mandt

    First, let me start off with some disclosure here.

    I have been involved in the publishing industry for almost my entire life, but mostly with free distribution papers (community papers, shopper publications etc). While it’s easy for me to criticize daily newspapers because I’ve been competing with them for years, I am able to step back and look at their current situation with a clinical and objective view.

    I think a big problem with daily newspapers in this country is that they have acted like monopolies for decades. This “Monopoly Mindset” is so ingrained in their culture, it makes it nearly impossible for them to change.

    Most markets have only 1 major daily newspaper. For the past 2 or 3 decades the dailies have been raising their prices while their circulation has been decreasing. They could do this because they believed that advertisers and readers had no place else to go; but we all know that readers of daily newspapers have been turning to other sources of news information for years.

    I make this point because the Monopoly Mindset is what is killing daily newspapers. In fact, it caused a culture of arrogance to become so ingrained, that they chose not to react fast enough (or at all) to the changes taking place in all segments of media.

    We’ve seen similar situations throughout the 20th century with other industries. Some large companies that believed they were “The Biggest”, “The Best”, and “No One Could Live Without Them” are now long gone. There are also examples of other companies with well established businesses that had the vision and courage to make changes and try new things; sometimes ultimately abandoning their original lines of business altogether.

    I believe that there will be some newspaper companies that survive, and these will be the ones that embrace change and stay focused on delivering good relevant local content. To succeed, they must aggressively carve out the elements in their organizations that still embrace the Monopoly Mindset. Carve it out like a cancer, because it is one!

  • john appleseed

    Newspapers are already dead and just don’t know it. Who wants to get thier news via this outdated method? Why not just print the ads in a shopping guide type of format with grocery inserts and other flyers and let the news run online, where it can be constantly up to date instead of old news before you even read it?

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  • http://www.socialfish.org Maddie Grant

    You can watch it happening on Twitter – @themediaisdying. Personally I think things have to die before they can be reborn better. : )

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