Monday, May 28, 2007
Why newspapers won’t die any time soon
The problem with some of the advocates of new media is they exaggerate.
Like those who say newspapers will be dead in 10 years’ time.
That isn’t going to happen.
Why? Well, not because of any of the efforts to make newspapers more attractive to readers — like redesigns or DVD cover-mounts.
No, the simple truth is history shows us no new mass medium has ever completely replaced a previous one.
So when radio news came along, newspapers didn’t die out. And radio didn’t go belly-up when TV came along.
What did happen was that the new medium became the dominant one, at the top of Chris Anderson’s curve in The Long Tail, and forcing the existing media further down — into more minority positions.
So why should the Web be any different?
In the short and medium-term that should be true — Web use will go up (as we can already see, boosted by massively-increased broadband penetration in the UK) and the time spent there won’t be spent reading newspapers, or gaining info from other media people used before the Web.
It’s a simple matter of arithmetic — our time is finite and time spent doing one thing means you don’t do something else instead.
But newspaper owners shouldn’t get too complacent yet. Long-term, newspapers as we know them — those bits of dead tree with last night’s news on them — will become such a minority taste that the economics of their production will put them under serious economic threat as a medium, as lots of small local papers are now.
Why? Because the people who buy them out of habit will be dying and the younger generations who are predominantly online now are unlikely to start changing to the habits of their parents or grandparents in media consumption. They’ll stay online, or getting info by whatever new means may have arrived and usurped the Web in another fit of “creative destruction” as imagined by Schumpeter.
When will this happen? Think 40 or 50 years from now, as the last of the Baby Boomers are getting on towards meeting their makers and their demographic significance as a market will make the economics of printing newspapers for them no longer viable.
That is, unless someone comes up with a way of printing papers in smaller runs cheaply.
Short of that, the newspaper really is dead. But just not yet. Or any time soon.
Like those who say newspapers will be dead in 10 years’ time.
That isn’t going to happen.
Why? Well, not because of any of the efforts to make newspapers more attractive to readers — like redesigns or DVD cover-mounts.
No, the simple truth is history shows us no new mass medium has ever completely replaced a previous one.
So when radio news came along, newspapers didn’t die out. And radio didn’t go belly-up when TV came along.
What did happen was that the new medium became the dominant one, at the top of Chris Anderson’s curve in The Long Tail, and forcing the existing media further down — into more minority positions.
So why should the Web be any different?
In the short and medium-term that should be true — Web use will go up (as we can already see, boosted by massively-increased broadband penetration in the UK) and the time spent there won’t be spent reading newspapers, or gaining info from other media people used before the Web.
It’s a simple matter of arithmetic — our time is finite and time spent doing one thing means you don’t do something else instead.
But newspaper owners shouldn’t get too complacent yet. Long-term, newspapers as we know them — those bits of dead tree with last night’s news on them — will become such a minority taste that the economics of their production will put them under serious economic threat as a medium, as lots of small local papers are now.
Why? Because the people who buy them out of habit will be dying and the younger generations who are predominantly online now are unlikely to start changing to the habits of their parents or grandparents in media consumption. They’ll stay online, or getting info by whatever new means may have arrived and usurped the Web in another fit of “creative destruction” as imagined by Schumpeter.
When will this happen? Think 40 or 50 years from now, as the last of the Baby Boomers are getting on towards meeting their makers and their demographic significance as a market will make the economics of printing newspapers for them no longer viable.
That is, unless someone comes up with a way of printing papers in smaller runs cheaply.
Short of that, the newspaper really is dead. But just not yet. Or any time soon.
Labels: Long Tail, newspapers, strategy
