One of the biggest trends today is the slow death of print media. It survived the rough blows of radio and then television to have been knocked out cold by the mushrooming giant that is new media.
The facts say it all: in 1996 just 2% of people read news online for three or more days a week – twelve years later that figure was 37% and is still growing. Digital is taking over from analogue and new media (the Internet, cellphones, MP3 players, digital TV etc.) is gobbling up audiences. Most of this new audience is made up of young people who have grown up with computers, DVD players and cellphones. These ‘digital nomads’ in the 18-24 age set have adopted new media more readily than any other age group, which is hardly surprising when the average child in America grows up with an average of 15 new media devices around them (so say MediaWise).
People like new media because they can choose what they want, when, where and how they want it. It is cheap, easily available and instant, so the moment a big story breaks readers can stay on top of it, instead of having to wait a whole day for the newspapers. Advertisers like new media too, because advertising online is extremely cheap. Whereas a prime time advert on American television goes for $103 000, it cost just a few cents to display an advert online. Advertisers can also measure their success rates online, counting the number of people that see their ad or click through to their site.
New media is also becoming more attractive to traditional media outlets because there are no printing or distribution costs and publishing is instant. Content is interactive, allowing people to engage with it and build a connection, and thus come back for more.
Most newspaper editors might sink into depression thinking about it, but the facts paint a pretty bleak picture of declining print media readership. For example, the Pew Center of America tells us that in 1993, 58% of people read a newspaper every day – in 2008 that had crashed to 34%. There are less people reading books and newspapers and unsurprisingly many newspapers around the globe are dying out. Instead, people are going online. In the United States in 2004, there were 41 million online newspaper readers. According to Nielsen Online, this now stands at a massive 73 million unique visitors per month. This is not just an American trend, as the number of global Internet users doubled between 2002 and 2009. There are a few places in the world like India and South Africa where print is growing, but only because those places lag behind the rest of the developed world and have a very small percentage of the population with Internet access.
The writing is on the wall, in 10 metre high neon letters: in 20 to 30 years time print media will almost disappear because all the older people who currently stick it out with ink and paper will have expired. At the moment, people 45 years and older are the main newspaper readers, who cling to the habit of flipping pages. Today youngsters spend more time (6.5 hours a day) in front of computer, TV and game screens than any activity apart from sleeping, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. When they are 45 years old, there is simply no way they will be turning pages made of paper.
There are a few hopeful signs for print, however. Speciality/niche publications and authoritative print publications will stick around for a while longer because of their branded reliability. But in time, the online editions will be much bigger and stronger than their print counterparts.
Thirty years from now, print journalists will still be around too, except that instead of writing mainly for paper mediums they will be writing for digital mediums. Print is not dead, but it smells bad.
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