MAYBE THE NEWSPAPER ISN’T ON THE EVE OF EXTINCTION?
January 11th 2008 12:19
Online sites and bloggers have over the past year or so gleefully heralded the demise of the newspaper, referring to printed media as dead tree media.
But now the conventional webdom wisdom seems to be reversing and some online sites are predicting either the rebirth of the printed word or at least the non-death of newspapers and magazine.
Latest online convert to the cause is Australia’s high-profile Crikey.com which yesterday asked, “Has the decline of print been greatly exaggerated?”
The answer, according to Crikey?
“The print media will live on because of its limitations as much as its strengths, argues William Powers in Hamlet’s Blackberry: Why Paper is Eternal, a discussion paper from the Joan Shorenstein Centre on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University. For concentrated reading of longer articles, essays and books, free of distractions, there’s nothing like this old-fashioned medium, Powers argues.
Three quarters of respondents “find Internet ads more intrusive than print ads, and 64 percent pay more attention to print ads than those online”, the survey found.
“Interestingly, the Gen-X sector (ages 25–41) found online ads more intrusive (79 percent) than baby boomers (72 percent).
Crikey also claimed the decline in overall newspaper sales seems to be tapering off, (whereas MediaBlab has been claiming newspapers in Australia have been holding their own) or even reversing slightly.
Crikey cites the 2004 book, How Australia Compares by Rodney Tiffen and Ross Gittins which showed that the big decline in total newspaper sales in Australia occurred in the 1990s and was mainly driven by the fall in the number of titles as a result of the closure of papers like the Melbourne Herald and the Sydney Mirror.
Meanwhile on Wednesday Goldman Sachs warned of a of a potential double-whammy downturn in the US newspaper industry, forecasting a 7.9 percent decline in revenue, a much more substantial drop than their earlier prediction of just 2.6 percent. .
The collapse in classifieds leads the way in the downturn it said, particularly with a meltdown in real-estate classifieds.
Goldman Sachs has cut earnings forecasts for the New York Times Company, McClatchy, Gannett, Belo, Journal Communications, and E.W. Scripps.
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