A Futurist Panel At The World Economic Forum Suggests Print Newspapers Will Cease By 2014 So Should We Start Packing Our Bags?

Philip M. Stone January 25, 2008

A World Economic Forum (WEF) panel featuring such futurists as Paul Saffo of Stanford and Peter Schwartz, chairman of Global Business Network, suggested Thursday that print newspapers will disappear by 2014. But ever since the Internet became a powerhouse we’ve heard similar predictions on the end of print, so, no need to pay attention to this prediction either. Right?

Right!

Mind you, it could well depend upon semantics. At last year’s WEF there was that famous quote by New York Times Company Chairman Arthur Sulzberger given to the Israeli Haaretz newspaper, “I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either.” That caused a bit of a hue and cry back at headquarters and a month later Sulzberger had to explain himself to staff.

“We are continuing to invest in our newspapers, for we believe that they will be around for a very long time. This point of view is not about nostalgia or a love of newsprint. Instead, it is rooted in fundamental business realities: Our powerful and trusted print brands continue to draw educated and affluent audiences.

"Traditional print newspaper audiences are still significantly larger than their Web counterparts. Print continues to command high levels of reader engagement. And, of course, we still make most of our money from print advertising and circulation revenue. And yes, I remember what I said here last year and what I was supposed to have said last month at Davos about not having a printed product in five years time.

"So let me clear the air on this issue. It is my heartfelt view that newspapers will be around--in print--for a long time. But I also believe that we must be prepared for that judgment to be wrong. My five-year timeframe is about being ready to support our news, advertising and other critical operations on digital revenue alone ...whenever that time comes."

Haaretz had also written in its interview, “Sulzberger says the New York Times is on a journey that will conclude the day the company decides to stop printing the paper. That will mark the end of the transition. It's a long journey, and there will be bumps on the road, says the man at the driving wheel, but he doesn't see a black void ahead.”

So based on all of that could it be the futurists are right that at some point in the future print newspapers will cease to be, and the only real crystal ball question is “When”?

Rebekah Wade, editor of Murdoch’s tabloid Sun newspaper with the largest daily circulation in the UK, believes it is going to take at least 15 years for Internet revenues to become meaningful to a print newspaper’s bottom line. She told a House of Lords Committee on Media Ownership and the News that The Sun's revenue from the internet would only become significant in “14 to 15 years time”.

While newspapers may be reporting huge increases in their Internet traffic and revenues she reminded the committee that the recent starting base was zero and that print revenues were significantly far more important than were the Internet’s.
"We have a set of projections and sets of targets that we want to achieve, and so far we are achieving them. Long-term I can't be detailed and say what percentage will come from the internet but it will become significant in 14 to 15 years time. Right now the (print) newspaper makes the money."

But she did agree that the Internet brought new readers to the newspaper – mainly younger readers. "Out of the 300,000 daily unique (Sun Internet) users 70% will be under 35. It's very different from the newspaper, online we are bringing young readers to the Sun world. This is our strategy," she said.

The debate of “when” rather than “if” has taken on added interest this week because of a piece in the Washington Post headlined, “Does The News Matter To Anyone Anymore” . It was written by former Baltimore Sun journalist David Simon who is now executive editor of the HBO series “The Wire” which in its final episode shows the struggles facing newspapers today. His Post article really bit for it gave pretty good chapter and verse how a great newspaper like the Baltimore Sun has transformed from the great newspaper it once was to what it is today, and there are few veteran journalists out there reading that article who couldn’t sub the name of their own newspaper in that same story in place of the Sun’s. That seems to have opened up a hornet’s nest of defensive reaction.

One such response,  by Alex Alben for the Seattle Times,  was fascinating for reminding us of the “writing on the wall”  prediction “on the future of news” given at a Columbia University forum in 1996 by Mike Slade, CEO of Starwave Corporation. Remember this was the time when the Internet was just beginning to make itself felt and a good five years before anyone heard of Craigslist. Slade’s view even then was that the newspaper print model was in trouble:

 “• Well over half of the content in a given daily edition is commodity content, such as feeds from The Associated Press and syndicated comics and columns;

“• The other half is really the product of (give or take) 50 to 100 people with journalism degrees;

“• A relatively small percentage of a given metro area subscribes to a daily paper;

“• Newspapers rely on classified ads, which would one day be supplanted by free online classified ads.”

His advice: Build a defensible business model, but the industry wasn’t listening and is now paying the cost.

What newspapers still have going for them is that people do very much want news in this modern digital world. The platforms may be varied, but they want news and newspapers are trying to find their niche in that multi-faceted world. The problem is that with the continuing staff cutbacks newspapers are inhibiting what most analysts believe is the one thing going for them – their dominance in being able to cover their own local communities.

With that in mind, one should not lose sight of what the Chicago Tribune is doing with its hyper-local web sites that now cover 21 communities in which readers themselves upload their community news. Who better to know what is happening locally then those who are living it?

The message there is really quite clear – either newspapers dominate that local and hyper-local reporting, or someone else, once again, will eat their cake and those dire predictions of ceasing to exist could be closer to the truth than any of us would care to believe.