As the Newspaper Industry Celebrates Its 400th Year,
The Unspoken Question Is Whether It Will Survive the Next 10 Years Let Alone the Next 100?
First of Three Parts

Philip M. Stone April 4, 2005

Being a newspaper publisher these days isn’t much fun. Everyone understands the various problems linked to the very survival of newspapers, new surveys and statistics are published seemingly every week supporting how the Internet will eventually kill newspapers, and yet the greatest media minds in the world still have not come up with the solution on how newspapers and the Internet can live together side-by-side.

Is the situation as bleak for mainstream newspapers as meets the eyes? For those who refuse to make great changes the answer is Yes, but for those who are not afraid to really shake things up in their product the answer is they can do very well.

Putting the current situation into perspective, Timothy Balding, director general of the World Association of Newspapers, noted recently, “Today, more than one billion people a day, across the planet, read a daily newspaper in print – a figure, not incidentally, that has risen nearly five per cent in the last five years. So, we’re not only 400 years old – or rather young – but we are globally enjoying great health and can presumably look forward to the next century or so, at least, with optimism.”

Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he? But take his figures and compare them to what has happened to Internet usage over the past three years and today’s situation becomes clear – there are about 890 million people accessing the Internet representing a 145% increase in usage since 2002, and that figure represents only 14% of the world’s population.

Five per cent growth over five years for newspaper readers compared to 146% growth in three years for the Internet. And the advertising numbers follow the same trends.

In the US for instance, newspapers have about $47 billion of advertising annually, and depending on which research organization one quotes that figure could grow by up to 5% this year. Internet advertising, on the other hand, is only at $1.3 billion, but it is expected to grow by some 25-30% this year.

And how are newspapers coping with such a situation. A lot of them are acting like ostriches basically putting their heads in the sand and hoping the problem will go away.

According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s State of the News Media 20005 report, affiliated with Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, newspapers are retrenching their online activities to protect the print product, cutting back on content and also cutting back on Internet staff.

It’s a difficult decision – do you think short term -- protect at all costs the product that today provides you with the bulk of your profits, or do you think long-term -- see the writing on the wall and keep the golden goose going for as long as possible, while investing heavily in the medium which looks like it is becoming the product of choice?

The Project for Excellence report warns, “The traditional media are leaving it to technology companies like Google and to individuals and entrepreneurs like bloggers to explore and innovate on the Internet. The risk is that traditional journalism will cede to such competitors both the new technology and the audience that is building there.”

Google News already attracts some 6 million readers daily and blog site readership is said to have grown by about 60% in the past six months to some 32 million readers. The plain fact of the matter is that people are rushing to the Internet for their news and the big decision newspapers have to make now is whether those people come to their web sites or they go elsewhere.

The good news is that newspaper web sites are very popular. The bad news is that many publishers consider that good news to be bad news. They believe one reason for growth of their web numbers is because of the circulation decline in their print product. So, some newspapers have started weakening the web product -- not putting all of the features found in the print edition on the Internet, delaying when some information is posted on the web, etc.

And as if it was not bad enough that readers are leaving the print editions to read news elsewhere, they also seems to be looking elsewhere for their advertising. Classified advertising used to be basically a newspaper monopoly – and its most lucrative profit center – but now free classified advertising is showing up globally on the web, and with EBay being a global auction house for just about anything for sale newspapers are being attacked more and more where it hurts the most.

Some publishers are fighting back by putting their own classified advertising on their own web site, but if those same publishers are taking steps to cut down on the attractiveness of their web sites then it is yet another example of why cutting back is a shot in the foot.

The obvious answer to all this is that a newspaper’s web site and the print edition should practice convergence as never before. Cross promotion of the other’s product should be the order of the day.

Watch the 24-hour news channels – CNN, BBC World – and after they report on the major story of the broadcast they unashamedly refer you to their web site where, you are told, much more about that story is available. It is exactly that type of cross promotion newspapers need to implement with their web sites.

Here’s just one example of how a newspaper’s Internet site and the print edition can work together to not only enlarge how a story is reported, but also to better compete with other media such as television.

Obviously, a newspaper can’t compete with video. It is a sad fact that newsprint doesn’t allow for moving pictures.  But the Internet does!

So the newspaper runs a story of limited length and one or two pictures covering a local event. That same story is filed to the Internet but with more details, and a picture gallery – not just the pictures taken from the print edition but many more from the same roll of film or the same disk. And the newspaper/web site needs to get into video business. The photographer who shoots still pictures with an electronic camera can just as easily shoot some electronic video, too. All of that goes on the web site and the print edition tells its readers that it’s all there.

In the reverse, if there are certain features the newspaper knows are of great interest to readers then keep that material just for the print edition. But the web heavily promotes what is in that day’s print edition that won’t be found on the web. Instead of the two mediums competing against one another they should be working together to promote the other.

The idea is to have your cake and eat it – keep up the circulation (and advertising of the print edition) while nurturing (not killing) a new profit center (the Internet).

First of three parts. Part two discusses whether a newspaper web site should be free or a subscription, and part three looks at how newspapers can best compete against newspapers