Face facts…the newspaper as a means of speeding the news or opinion is dead. I declare that within the lifetime of most readers of this blog, we will see the end of the commercial daily newspaper as we know it.
I base this on fact and not hunch. Ten years ago, the UK Sunday newspaper circulation was twice what it is today. Out of the 60+ daily UK titles, only a few held audience figures last year and most experienced declines in readership of around 6%. Give it another ten years and the readerships will have at least halved again. The irony is…we are consuming more news now than ever before, but using the web to do it.
Worse news is that newspapers don’t make a huge pile of revenue from copy sales, they make it from advertising. How many people now go to their newspaper when looking for a car, holiday, job or even a date? All of this advertising revenue has moved online and the newspapers are doing a bad job of capturing the online spend. They use the old traditional advertising models and simply try to shift them to the internet. It’s time they restructured and got creative.
In previous newspaper dips, the pundits talked about cycles. Do they really think that all of the advertising spend will come back? With lower copy sales, falling advertising revenues and changing habits where readers demand up to the minute news on the mobile phone or across a myriad of devices, how will newsprint survive? The answer is it won’t.
“TV and radio both survived, one didn’t replace the other,” I hear you say. But I ask you how many people still used the horse and cart once motor transport became popular? The newspaper is the old horse we love and have an emotional attachment toward but I fear we must face its ever-imminent demise.
