The Decline and Fall of Print?
The Irish Times contacted me late last week about the future of print publications in the United States.
We talked via g-chat. The transcript’s below.
me: Alright. My girlfriend is giving me time off from painting the apartment. Hope i can answer some of your questions.
Conn: haha. well I don’t want to get you in trouble. so will be quick. so, first can you talk to me a little about ScribeMedia, and how you guys have been weathering the storm? Are you in a better position than, say, the newspapers?
me: Sure. ScribeMedia does a few things. We’re a software development, media production and new media consulting firm. ScribeMedia.org is our publication and focusses on the business, technology and culture of digital media.
Since we have three basic business practices, we can push forward with each and not solely rely on any particular one to survive.
me: So are we in a better position than newspapers? Depends on what we’re talking about when we refer to them.
If it’s the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and others of that size and scale, no.
They have such tremendous resources and are diversified with what they do, and continue to diversify their services.
Are we in a better position than your average mid-size paper. Probably. I say that because it was never in the mid-size paper’s DNA to have multiple business practices. So they’re kind of stuck while knowing they have to evolve.
Conn: right.
so, this is a fairly big question, I guess, but how well do you think the print media is responding to the changing business environment?
me: Well, there’s endless chatter about it and you see that their first steps are to downsize, or even reduce the frequency of their print publication.
For example, the Christian Science Monitor is going fully digital with, I think, everything but a Sunday print edition.
(I have to check on their frequency).
They problem publications find themselves in though is that while it’s cheaper to be purely digital, and while ad dollars are flowing online, they ad dollars aren’t as rich as what they were getting offline.
It’s kind of like everyone’s in triage mode.
The simple fact of it though is that online readership is going up while print readership is going down. The obvious question becomes, how do we monetize the growing online audience and alleviate the losses we’re experiencing in print.
No one has a real model for that yet.
Conn: Do you think there’s a kind of vicious circle, in that readers are turned off by the decline in quality, as papers get thinner?
me: Definitely. That’s an absolute vicious circle.
News rooms look at how they can cut back on costs and the first thing they see is actual human resources.
So they lay off 10-20% of staff and think they can continue to put out a great product. The simple math of it though is that the coverage isn’t going to be as rich.
Or, they start cutting back on investigative pieces because they’re not sustainable in and of themselves as business propositions.
Previously, real estate listings or general classified ads were bringing in oodles of cash that could fund enterprise reporting. That’s not the case anymore because people don’t open their paper to look for real estate or their analogs.
They go to Web sites that deal sepecifically with what they’re looking for.
Conn: do you think that some media organisations are being rather short sighted in the rush to lay people off?
me: I don’t know if short sighted is the right word because if an organization is hemorrhaging money and it’s a matter of pure survival, they have to do something, and issuing a mass of pink slips is the quickest way to go about doing it.
It’s what they do afterwords that becomes important.
If they just continue in the direction that they were heading when they needed to lay people off, and don’t innovate, don’t do something new, then they’re going to be in the same position of needing to cut costs a few months down the road.
So, laying people off might be an unfortunate necessary first step, but if there isn’t a plan of changing basic business operations afterwords, they might as well fold shop now because the print ad and subscription environment isn’t going to change.
Conn: when you talk about companies needing to innovate - can you tell me of any specific examples of where companies have done this successfully?
me: The models are being worked out but the a basic first step is true embrace of readership by opening up tools and communications channels between the news organization and its audience.
Examples of this are the New York Times opening up it’s “citizen reporting”, CNN doing the same with its iReport initiative, Salon with Open Salon and even things that are more modest like truly using commenting and engaging those that comment.
An example of that is the New Republic where authors/editors actually engage people who take the time to comment on articles.
All of this builds greater transparency with the organization, leverages loyalty of those who are reading the paper (even if it’s now the online version), and creates advocates out of a news organization’s most precious resource, its viewership.
That said, you’d have to talk specifically with those organizations about how all this is affecting their bottom lines.
Conn: ok, this is all great stuff. so final question which is rather predicable, but has to be asked: so do you think there’s any future in print?
me: Sure. I just don’t think it will look the same as we traditionally think of it or view it. For example, television didn’t kill radio but radio definitely changed.
Film didn’t kill television but it too changed.
The Web, or digital distribution more properly isn’t about to kill off that which preceded it but will make it change.
Ideas here could include the following (hold on a sec, my stereo is freaking out)…
…Ok, I’m back. A print publication such as a magazine can be more highly curated, be more reflective in the articles it publishes, can get advance feedback from its online audience as to what should be in the next edition, can actually know exactly how many issues it should print for its next run because they can gather that information from its online audience and move to an on-demand publishing model.
Newspapers are a trickier nut to crack since they publish daily so don’t have that leisure between “issues”.
But print will be here. It just won’t dominate, and the model between publishers, editors and journalists speaking to the uninformed masses from on high is gone. It’s a two way conversation now that needs to be embraced.
Conn: excellent!
Thanks so much for this
oh, one final, final thing
how should I quote you?
me: No problem.
Michael Cervieri, Executive Producer, ScribeMedia.org.
Feel free to shoot me any follow-ups if needed.
Conn: will do
sure
ok, so once again
thanks a lot
will email you link when piece comes out
me: anytime… i’m off to paint.
Michael Cervieri is a ScribeLabs co-founder and an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs where he teaches a course called Tubes, Code and Content. On Twitter, he's @bmunch.
Discussion
Post a comment