There’s An Old Saying, 'The Rich Get Richer And The Poor Get Poorer' And When It Comes To Newspaper Web Sites A Harvard University Study Says That Adage Is Still True

Philip M. Stone September 4, 2007

The basic newspaper strategy these days is to maintain margins as much as possible on the print side while investing heavily on increasing visits to the newspaper web site, because that site eventually is going to have to become a major financial player on the newspaper’s bottom line. So Harvard University has unleashed a real shocker of a report that basically says that might be true for all the really big guys, but for everyone else usage at newspaper web sites has already leveled off and in many cases it is already declining.

The big guys, The New York Times, Washington Post , USA Today and the like are growing their site visitors by some 10% annually, a gain of about 1 million unique visitors each month, and while that is double digit percentage growth it’s still less than the euphoric expectations of a couple of years ago. But the Harvard study says most other newspaper web sites are actually losing audience.

That, of course, goes against all the spin of newspaper trade organizations such as the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) that continually promotes how newspaper web sites are each quarter growing their traffic and they are responsible for around a third of all web traffic. Based on the Harvard study it probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to ask the NAA to break down growth from now on for say, the top 20 newspaper web sites and everyone else. The Harvard study says that would paint a very different growth picture.

The Harvard study, “Creative Destruction: An Exploratory Look at News On The Internet” was released by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government and was written by Thomas E. Patterson, a heavyweight in public opinion and the media. His book on the media's political role, Out of Order, received the American Political Science Association's Graber Award as the best book of the decade in political communication and an earlier book, The Unseeing Eye, was named by the American Association for Public Opinion Research as one of the 50 most influential books on public opinion in the past half century.

The new study says that when it comes to traditional media’s presence on the web, brand name television networks are increasing their traffic by about 30% a year, and even local commercial television and radio are gaining online audiences though at a lesser pace, but newspapers are now being nailed for a variety of reasons, not the least being the growth in non-traditional news providers such as Google, Yahoo, AOL, MSN, topix.net, digg.com, newsvine.com and reddit.com.

“The Web particularly threatens daily newspapers,” the report said. “They were among the first to post news on the Internet but their initial advantage has all but disappeared in the face of increased competition from electronic media and non-traditional providers.”

And it stresses the threat is more to local news organizations than it is to those media with national reputations because the Internet favors known brand names –“those relatively few news organizations that readily come to mind by Americans everywhere when they seek news on the Internet.”

Local news organizations do, of course, have one big thing going for them within their own communities and that is their brand. The newspaper is known in print, it will be trusted on the web, too. The report says, therefore, that local news is very important to local newspapers in drawing in the local community, but newspapers should not make the mistake of being only hyper local. Readers also want some regional, state, national and international information and if their local newspaper web site doesn’t provide that then the readers will go elsewhere for it. “Ironically, some news organizations do not feature the day’s news prominently on their web sites, forgoing their natural advantage,” the report lamented.

And a main point the report makes, which circulation and TV ratings have shown for some time to be true, is that “the audiences of older media have declined.” Within the past year “newspaper circulation has fallen by 3% and broadcast news has lost 1 million viewers,” the report said.

In days gone by local communities relied on their local newspaper to provide all the information necessary for day-to-day living. Network television was a mind-buster in that it introduced a national news organization into the local home no matter where it may be. And the Internet has continued in that vein – geography is no longer in so much play when it comes to choosing a news source, unless it is for that local angle.

What that means is that a local newspaper’s real advantage is its local coverage. The fear now is that as newspapers cut and cut to maintain traditionally high margins they will cut into that local news coverage to such an extend the reader will go elsewhere.

With the dismal Harvard study in mind, there is some better news for newspapers from a new study by Kantar Media Research Group and Pointlogic. It says that consumers still find mainstream media having the greatest influence and trust. When asked which media helped them to decide whether to trust a brand consumers ranked TV ranked first with 26%, followed by newspapers at 21%.

“When we ask consumers about how they perceive different forms of advertising we get a higher score for the traditional media and the emerging media are scoring quite low – lower than I expected,” according to Peter Klopogge, managing director of Pointlogic in the US. “The conclusion is that the traditional media should still be the cornerstone for brand advertising and that the new media still have a long way to go before they can replace the traditional media.”

For newspapers, that’s a message that really needs spreading within the advertising community.

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