I first met Mark Anderson about ten years ago when I was Program Director at Seybold Seminars. He was a frequent keynote speaker, and justifiably so. I learned then of his remarkable newsletter, Strategic News Service, to which I've subscribed since just after meeting Mark. Two things struck me about Mark: he's brilliant, and like the best of the brilliant, as affable a man as you could ever wish to encounter. As I note in my Friends links, Mark's newsletter is not widely-known or quoted. It's pricey (although there are several generous introductory prices), but its subscribers, as you will see, are a who's who of the high tech industry.
In the last issue Mark wrote what I felt was the best and most heartfelt analysis of what's wrong with the news (and newspaper) industry today. He has kindly agreed to allow me to reprint it in full:
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Where Is the News?
I just hate the "news," don't you? And it starts with where we get it from.
It used to be that the picture of contentedness was Dad in his slippers, in the Big Chair, with a pipe and a brandy, Lassie at his side, reading the evening newspaper. Or a young couple on Sunday, spending all morning in bed reading parts of the Sunday New York Times.
Forget that.
Today, here is where my news comes from:
1. I wake up in the morning to my clock radio, set to news, National Public Radio. All I hear is stories of bloodshed and death, and I always end up turning it off as I feel the headache coming on, replacing it with classical music from Canada.
2. I see the morning Seattle papers, and USAToday. If I read one of them, the other two are pretty much copies of the first. There is rarely anything they deem important that occurs in only one: they are clones. And most of the stories they carry are wire stories, so I read about the kinky dog thing in Oklahoma in two or three papers.
3. I see the morning national papers, such as the WSJ and NYTimes. Their stories, too, are rote, generally remixes of press releases, or providing the propagandic mouthpiece for political hacks, without doing any investigating to find the "truth of the matter" being sold to me as fact.
4. I go to the Net, where I get more of the above in online form, or the Wild West of bloggerland, with its best (fresh, independent) and worst (no fact-checking or little editing) sides.
What Is the News?
Who decides what the news is? Perhaps it used to be Edward R. Murrow, but today, it's someone with an economic gun to his (or her) head. If you doubt me, ask anyone at the LA Times or the Chicago Tribune, whose most recent owner is cutting jobs as fast as he can, after his plans to sell ball clubs and other assets went south; or ask anyone from the NYTimes, which is so badly managed now that its independence is doubtful; or ask anyone from the WSJ, whose happy new owner, Rupert Murdoch, didn't bother waiting a full year to break his agreements with the Bancroft family and violate the editorial integrity of its staff.
Newspapers are vanishing, as their classified ad revenues are stripped away by Craigslist and other Net offerings, as they cut their news staffs to nothing, and as they shift to tabloid headlines or become reprinters of wire stories.
A friend of mine used to run the TV news for NBC in Los Angeles. You've all heard the "if it bleeds, it leads" mantra, but things are worse, and more detailed in practice, than that. At least in his case (and he was a rising star), the priorities for this top American market were simple: fires, murder, gunshots, disasters. FMGD. You can use "Fairy Makeup: Gossamer Diamonds" to remember this critical in-house mantra for the crap you'll be seeing on the local news for the next 10 years.
For whatever reason, this remains the norm for the local TV news today. My friend Barry Diller, whose media sense I greatly admire, thinks local news will survive, even as other traditional news media decline, and he's probably right. My only request: just stop calling it "news." It sure doesn't contain anything I want to hear about, and it is almost clinically depressing.
Even in such rarefied markets as Technology News, Green News, and Business News, I find that the news redistributed by major channels is just a re-chewing of press releases from the major companies. Here is this product: review it. Here is this new CEO: interview him or her. This is usually followed by a sidebar by one of a million "pundits" who have really strong opinions, but no track record, nor any reason I can fathom that they are even being asked for input.
And that is the "news."
The News Experience
Which brings us to the experience of taking in the news each day – for many of us, throughout the day. Whether you're a trader, investor, manager, or product chief, you tend to keep coming back to learn what's going on. (When CNN began branding individual Iraq wars with their own logos and lead music, I started to understand how warped the coverage of news had become.)
The experience of taking in the news today, on a regular basis, is punishing: emotionally, spiritually, intellectually.
When I said "clinically depressing" a few paragraphs above, I was being deadly serious: I have a theory that today's "news" is generally mentally, perhaps even physically, depressing. Subject matter is often dark – even if pandering to morbid group fascination for dark subjects – and is chosen to be so. And there is a lot of it, so it weighs heavily on the soul. (How many thousands of deaths can you take per day? And there is not a thing you can do about any of it.)
Today's news, no matter how you get it, is a passive experience. The handful of remaining owners (in U.S. markets) are the distributors, and we are, quite literally, the victims. Feeling a little down lately? Try staying away from the "news" for a couple of days, and take a walk in the woods in the mornings instead. Wow! What a difference.
The whole news establishment is "off," in my opinion, and the Net has helped to give people enough choices that TV and Newspaper news operations are going to be completely dumped, whatever is left of them. Local news consumers will split between the lurid National Enquirer crowd and those who care about local sports, events, and charities.
Alcohol, a chemical depressant, is also addictive, in perhaps the same way that news is. Lucky for us, news is easier to walk away from, and that is what many people today are doing. The majority of the younger U.S. demographic now watches comedians, rather than news anchors, for their nightly news. The reportage of Walter Cronkite, who served as the conscience and news filter for several generations of Americans, has now been replaced by that of stand-up comic Jon Stewart.
Is there any confusion about this trend, or what is behind it? No. People are replacing Goebbels-like propaganda with comedic entertainment, and getting more honest information-handling in the process.
Rupert's Fox News channel, once claiming to be "Fair and Balanced" before this became so patently laughable on a propaganda-only station, would be Exhibit A of what is wrong with TV news today. Its news actually contains proven lies. And Fox knows it: it has even dropped that disgusting motto. Wow.
As comedian Stewart once publicly said to CNN's Tucker Carlson: "You're harming the country. Stop it."
A lot of people – particularly in the 18-25 age group – have just stopped watching, and reading, the "news" altogether.
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Mark did not just write a polemic, but also offers a solution. As I wrote to Mark when requesting permission to republish this piece, the solution would be somewhat obscure to those who are not familiar with Strategic News Service, and he agreed with that. As he wrote in the newsletter, "I am also pleased to announce that, as of today, we at SNS have created a new way of selecting, experiencing, and relating to the news. We're calling it SNS Interactive News™, or SNS iNews™."
To my mind it is a stellar version of the long-awaited "community of readers." The SNS community is a close group, interested in one another's ideas and undertakings, and Mark has created an ideal platform for readers to keep track of what matters to them, and to keep in touch with each other.
You have two choices now. Send $14.95 to SNS for a four issue subscription, or write to me directly (thad@thefutureofpublishing.com). As a subscriber I'm allowed to forward this issue to you, cc'ing Mark, and you'll receive four issues for free. You will have a chance to make your own evaluation of SNS iNews, as well as the remarkable newsletter. I'm sure you won't regret it.
The title of this blog entry is approximately the title of the ever-reliable Pew Research Center for the People and the Press' latest report, "Key News Audiences Now Blend Online And Traditional Sources," subtitled "Pew Research Center Biennial News Consumption Survey." As I'm fond of saying, the report is both exhaustive and exhausting, weighing in at some 129 pages. Perhaps this is more than most of us would like to know (although in fact the analysis and commentary comprises about half of the total, the rest being devoted to detailed statistical analyses).
The report adds bulk by segmenting the audience, for example into:
1. Integrators, who get the news from both traditional sources and the internet
2. Net-Newsers, who principally turn to the web for news, and largely eschew traditional sources
3. Traditionalists, who say that seeing pictures and video, rather than reading or hearing the facts, gives them the best understanding of events...and the
4. Disengaged, who stand out for their low levels of interest in the news and news consumption
There are numerous informative charts in the report; one of the most startling is below.
I've been clapping my hands for newspapers, hoping this will keep them alive, but this data does depress. It's certainly bad news for the printed versions of newspapers (which should not surprise unless you've been vacationing in Tonga for the last year, waiting for the new monarch to emerge), but also doesn't bode well for the online future of newspapers either.
When you look at the slightly broader picture painted by the chart below, it's difficult to put on a happy face, although you see a more complex picture, as suggested by the title of the report. "Traditional Sources" in the Pew study refers largely to television. While the nightly network news has taken a big hit since 1993, followed by local TV news, both cable news and morning news are holding their own, or gaining slightly.
The more delicate and yet most intriguing fact in the report is stated bluntly: "In spite of the increasing variety of ways to get the news, the proportion of young people getting no news (emphasis mine) on a typical day has increased substantially over the past decade. About a third of those younger than 25 (34%) say they get no news on a typical day, up from 25% in 1998."
I'm still in the camp that believes that getting some of the news, some of the time, is an essential part of living in a democratic society. To imagine that a third of those half my age do not share this opinion is troubling to me. Change is coming, we just don't know what it is.
Many will remember the immortal words of J.M. Barrie in Peter Pan: "If you believe in fairies, then clap your hands." Many are urging us to do the same for newspapers. For some commentators clapping our hands might represent the only hope remaining for the daily newspaper in the U.S.
I thought of this as I read Chris Hedges report article on AlterNet titled "The Internet Is No Substitute for the Dying Newspaper Industry" (courtesy, once again of Bob Sacks).
I read this article the day after finishing Neil Henry's "American Carnival: Journalism Under Siege in an Age of New Media," published by the University of California Press.
The article, and Henry's book, point to two aspects of the tradition of the press in America. On the one hand, there is a great deal of sentimentalism that the press in America is more or less synonymous with our democratic freedoms, and the "twaddle" we encounter on the Web doesn't even begin to do justice to what the press has been serving for oh so many years.
This sentimentalism is embodied in quotations that could fill a book, but this one, from Thomas Jefferson, well embodies the sensibility: "No government ought to be without censors and where the press is free, no one ever will."
Of course well before the advent of the Internet the sentiments were not all positive, as noted in the oft-quoted remark from A.J. Liebling: "Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one."
Neil Henry takes great care in enumerating the more modern problems of press credibility: celebrity journalists, bogus exposes, owner interference and onward.
He is not a follower of one of my heroes, Noam Chomsky, who has reported repeatedly (some would say ad nauseum) on the massive biases of the American press, a result of so many factors, from meddling publishers to an ingrained centrist outlook of those who most often serve as reporters at the daily papers.
But of course the most recent issue that has robbed tremendous credibility from American media (not just newspapers) was the blind support for George Bush and the Iraq war. The massive gaffe still stings many, and has hurt the press as much as it has destroyed Bush's legacy. There's a strong argument to be made that quite apart form the Internet the press was well on the way to destroying itself.
So now we're in a recession in the U.S. and the newspaper industry appears to be crumbling. But both Hedges and Henry do a fine job of reminding us of what the press could be, of what the press should be. Will the Web prove a suitable substitute for an apparently dying newspaper industry? Clap your hands, regardless of which side of the fence you occupy.
This marvelous document appears on the Tell Zell: What You Really Think blog, "courtesy of Andrew Spencer, now 10. Sent in and used with the permission of his mom, Gail Gedan Spencer, a blogger and copy editor at the Sun"
I'll just note a small part of her commentary, and encourage you to visit the site.
"I'm sending you something that I've had taped up at my work station for the past few years. It's a worksheet on careers that my son did in first grade. As you can see, a love of journalism must have passed into his DNA from my husband and me. It's hopeful and sad at the same time. (He now has more sensible career goals -- cartoon voice artist or professional sports team mascot.)"
I don't think we should despair about the future of newspapers. I think we should keep the faith.
It's not as if the last few months have been exactly
perky and upbeat around publishing offices across the U.S. But the last week seems
to have been completely inundated with a dismal torrent of bad news. Both Hearst
(3rd largest magazine publishing in the U.S.) and Hachette (dropped
out of the #10 spot in 2006, but presumably still in the top 15) lost their
chief executives - whatever language the companies used in
making the announcements, these guys got the boot.
Meanwhile the big newspaper companies were reporting
horrible financial results: Gannett Co., which publishes more than eighty U.S.
newspapers, acknowledged that publishing ad revenue fell 14.3% in May. Its smaller
rival McClatchy Co. reported a 15% drop in newspaper ad revenue for the first
five months of the year and announced a 10% cut of its work force. New York
Times Co. said last Wednesday that ad revenue dropped 12%. And on June 17,
Bloomberg reported
that "Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune controlling investor Sam
Zell may be unable to stop the loss of advertising revenue leading him and
other U.S. newspaper publishers closer to default on billions of dollars in
debt."
My take on all of this is the opposite of Robert Schiller's
well-known phrase (and book title) "Irrational Exuberance." I call it Irrational Pessimism.
As I pointed out in my blog entry "Is
the Internet Really Destroying Newspapers?", quoting from a PEW report, "Even with so
many new sources, more people now consume what old media newsrooms produce,
particularly from print, than before. Online, for instance, the top 10 news Web
sites, drawing mostly from old brands, are more of an oligarchy, commanding a
larger share of audience than in the legacy media."
Yesterday I received the executive summary of PWC's "Global
Entertainment and Media Outlook: 2008-2012" (at 112 pages, it's a little more
than the average executive might expect in a summary!). The full report would
take me offline for weeks, but the executive summary represents a marvelous
chunk of research. Notable is PWC's prognosis for the newspaper industry:
continuing declines through 2009, followed by a return to modest growth.
As this chart from PEW illustrates, Hearst is not
suffering in terms of revenue growth. The two firings, as suggested in several
media reports, may have much more to do with internal company politics than with
failed strategies. (A fascinating article in Fortune, "Intrigue
at Hearst's Castle," examines the intricacies of Hearst's corporate
structure.)
These days it's very easy to get on the newspapers-are-dying
bandwagon. I think that the conclusion to this story is still to be written.
-30-
I am still reeling from Steve Ballmer's atrociously
ill-considered remarks
to The Washington Post (Ballmer, as most recall, is CEO of Microsoft,
when Bill G. is not at home) that "there will be no media consumption left in
10 years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers,
no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an
electronic form."
My retort: "in 10 years there will be no software that
Microsoft will be able to profit from either in operating systems or as
shrink-wrapped software."
I am
willing to meet him for a duel at dawn.
More credit where credit is due: I was alerted to this provocative
May 2008 column on Slate.com by
Bob Sacks in his "'Heard on the Web'
Media Intelligence newsletter.
Back in the prehistoric era, i.e. 1993, mega-bestselling
author Michael Crichton wrote an article for Wired magazine called Mediasaurus.
In the article he made several predictions, expanding from the premise stated
in his first paragraph, "To my mind, it is likely that what we now understand
as the mass media will be gone within ten years. Vanished, without a trace."
Jack Shafer, Slate's "editor at large," revisits those
predictions with Crichton, as well as referencing his earlier visit with Crichton in the same
subject in 2002. When challenged that as of 2002 his predictions appeared still
far from accurate, Crichton responded: "I assume that nobody can predict the
future well. But in this particular case, I doubt I'm wrong; it's just too
early."
Crichton complains bitterly (as many other commentators
have noted) that the decline of newspapers and television are not simply
because of the Web alternative, but also the ever-decreasing quality of those
media.
Shafer notes Crichton's belief that "it will take a media
visionary…somebody like Ted Turner --to create the high-quality information
service he foresaw in his 1993 essay. In addition to building the service, the
visionary will also have to convince news consumers that they need it."
The
30+ comments that follow the article are the usual vituperative mumbo-jumbo;
the article itself, a good read.
The Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) is a superb research organization funded by the Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C. Its website is a rich treasure trove of research, analysis and commentary tackling the challenge of "understanding news in the digital age."
PEJ's flagship report is its annual State of the News Media. The 2008 edition was published on March 17th, 2008. The report covers not just newspapers, but television, magazines, radio, online and more. The full report is some 700 pages, highly-readable, and exhaustive – but also exhausting. I quote from parts of the report in various sections of this site.
PEJ drops a little bombshell in the introduction and overview to the 2008 report. While acknowledging that "state of the American news media in 2008 is more troubled than a year ago," it continues that "the problems, increasingly, appear to be different than many experts have predicted."
Pointing to Chris Anderson's famous The Long Tail theory, it states that "critics have tended to see technology democratizing the media and traditional journalism in decline. Audiences, they say, are fragmenting across new information sources, breaking the grip of media elites. Some people even advocate the notion of "The Long Tail," the idea that, with the Web's infinite potential for depth, millions of niche markets could be bigger than the old mass market dominated by large companies and producers."
However, the introduction continues, "the reality, increasingly, appears more complex. Looking closely, a clear case for democratization is harder to make. Even with so many new sources, more people now consume what old media newsrooms produce, particularly from print, than before. Online, for instance, the top 10 news Web sites, drawing mostly from old brands, are more of an oligarchy, commanding a larger share of audience than in the legacy media (emphasis mine). The verdict on citizen media for now suggests limitations. And research shows blogs and public affairs Web sites attract a smaller audience than expected and are produced by people with even more elite backgrounds than journalists (emphasis mine)."
As I've pointed out repeatedly on this site, and others never tire to reiterate, newspapers are unquestionably facing serious circulation and revenue challenges. But as the heavily-concentrated newspaper industry slowly adjusts to the new economic realities of the Web, and quite conceivably masters them, they may find their brands stronger than ever.
The ever-reliable New Yorker checked in late last month with a long analysis on the fate of the newspaper industry. Entitled "Out of Print: The death and life of the American newspaper," author Eric Alterman sounds no more cheerful than the rest of us as to where newspapers are headed. Early in the article he states: "Few believe that newspapers in their current printed form will survive. Newspaper companies are losing advertisers, readers, market value, and, in some cases, their sense of mission at a pace that would have been barely imaginable just four years ago." He continues: "Few corporations have been punished on Wall Street the way those who dare to invest in the newspaper business have."
Alterman, notes, as many have, to the changing newspaper readership demographic. He highlights the "ironic injustice…that when a reader surfs the Web in search of political news he frequently ends up at a site that is merely aggregating journalistic work that originated in a newspaper, but that fact is not likely to save any newspaper jobs or increase papers' stock valuation."
At the same time, he also notes that "no Web site spends anything remotely like what the best newspapers do on reporting. Even after the latest round of new cutbacks and buyouts are carried out, the Times will retain a core of more than twelve hundred newsroom employees, or approximately fifty times as many as the Huffington Post. The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times maintain between eight hundred and nine hundred editorial employees each. The Times' Baghdad bureau alone costs around three million dollars a year to maintain. And while the Huffington Post shares the benefit of these investments, it shoulders none of the costs."
And now Alterman's true thesis begins to emerge, when he writes that "it is impossible not to wonder what will become of not just news but democracy itself, in a world in which we can no longer depend on newspapers to invest their unmatched resources and professional pride in helping the rest of us to learn, however imperfectly, what we need to know…And so we are about to enter a fractured, chaotic world of news, characterized by superior community conversation but a decidedly diminished level of first-rate journalism."
He continues: "In 'Imagined Communities' (1983), an influential book on the origins of nationalism, the political scientist Benedict Anderson recalls Hegel's comparison of the ritual of the morning paper to that of morning prayer: 'Each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion.' It is at least partially through the 'imagined community' of the daily newspaper, Anderson writes, that nations are forged.
Alterman's conclusion: "Finally, we need to consider what will become of those people, both at home and abroad, who depend on such journalistic enterprises to keep them safe from various forms of torture, oppression, and injustice. 'People do awful things to each other,' the veteran war photographer George Guthrie says in 'Night and Day,' Tom Stoppard's 1978 play about foreign correspondents. 'But it's worse in places where everybody is kept in the dark.' Ever since James Franklin's New England Courant started coming off the presses[in 1721], the daily newspaper, more than any other medium, has provided the information that the nation needed if it was to be kept out of 'the dark.' Just how an Internet-based news culture can spread the kind of 'light' that is necessary to prevent terrible things, without the armies of reporters and photographers that newspapers have traditionally employed, is a question that even the most ardent democrat in John Dewey's tradition may not wish to see answered."
Eric Alterman's view of the role of the daily newspaper is a traditional one, certainly not much in vogue amongst today's Web enthusiasts. Bloggers are now hailed for providing "the kind of 'light' that is necessary to prevent terrible things" and again the Web enthusiasts take great pride in pointing to important stories that were uncovered first in blogs, stories that the conventional news media had overlooked.
Are blogs and news aggregation Web sites truly going to supplant the role filled by newspapers for several centuries? The question may remain unanswered until the last newspaper shuts its doors.
Of all media industries assaulted by changes wrought by the Internet, it's a toss-up as to which is considered the more beleaguered, newspapers or music. Not an enviable prize for which to compete.
Certainly both receive plenty of coverage of their varying woes – their problems are not well-kept secrets. But I've not seen such a damning indictment of the newspaper industry as the one appearing in today's New York Times. In an article titled "Newspapers' New Owners Turn Grim," journalist David Carr focuses in particular on the wealthy (and dare I say egotistical?) individuals and/or their private equity firms who convinced themselves in the last several years that newspapers looked like a good bet for the future.
Opinions are apparently rapidly changing. According to an article quoted from The Baltimore Sun, Sam Zell, "the motorcycle-riding real estate mogul who took control of Tribune in an $8.2 billion sale in December" said "The news business is something worse than horrible. If that's the future, we don't have much of a future."
Brian P. Tierney, who bought The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Philadelphia Daily News in 2006, is quoted in The Times article saying "I'm an optimist, but it is very hard to be positive about what's going on."
David Carr notes that the newspaper industry has not yet hit the bottom of the rocky shoals. Last year overall newspaper revenues dropped by about 7 percent, he notes, but meanwhile publishing, like so many other industries, is only now confronting the second whammy: the U.S. recession. He quotes one (anonymous) analyst predicting a 15% revenue drop in 2008.
Further, newspapers are undercutting their own chances of bouncing back after the recession because in order to weather the current downturn they're cutting staff, undermining the quality of their product, and any likelihood of readers (and advertisers) rushing back in the future.
It's a terribly grim picture of this once-grand industry.
The New York Times announced recently that it would shift away from its partially subscriber-based model to solely an ad-based model. Here is one of the most valuable media properties in publishing changing its tune, and perhaps signaling a new tune for all newpapers. As reported in InformationToday, "All the News That's Fit to Print" became "All the News That's Fit to Give Away."
The number of subscribers was growing steadily. The total readership was 787,400, of which 227,000 were $50/year paying subscribers with the rest a combination of college students with free access (89,200) and home delivery subscribers to the print edition who chose to add TimesSelect at no extra charge (471,200). The service earned $10 million annually in subscription fees.
Then on November 13th, although Rupert Murdoch has yet to take formal ownership of Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal, he told reporters: "We are studying it and we expect to make that free, and instead of having one million, having at least 10 million-15 million in every corner of the earth." The New York Times reported that "the Web site, one of the few news sites globally to successfully introduce a subscription model, currently has around one million subscribers, which generates about $50 million in user fees." (Apparently an understated number, as the minimum price for an online-only subscription is $79/year, with renewals at $99/year.)
Reactions to both announcements have been mixed. There's an emerging group of hardcore believers determibed that the future of the Internet lies solely in the success of advertising programs.
Others, like commentator Barry Ritholtz make some compelling points: "Thumb through either the print or online Journal, and you will see many high end, luxe advertisers. They are not attracted by the sheer volume of readers, but rather by the very appealing reader demographics: They pay a huge premium in ad rates to reach the highly educated, high income, tech savvy, free spending readers of the WSJ."
Meanwhile on November 1, Tom Curley, president and CEO of The Associated Press, in a speech to the annual Knight-Bagehot Dinner, offered several trenchant observations. "The portals are running off with our best stuff, and we're afraid or unable to make or enforce deals that drive fair value," he remarked. And later: "We must change how we charge for content. In the financial marketplace, hot news is the most valuable of all. Hedge funds pay premiums, add spiders and link to trading programs. One-size-fits-all on the business side has to evolve..."
As Mr. Ritholtz concluded, "Mr. Murdoch has shown over the years that he is a crafty businessman with a good feel for what the reading/viewing public wants. We'll find out soon enough what the fate of the firewalled WSJ.com will be..."
Exactly.
The Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) self-refers as the "Gold Standard in Media Audits" and is the place to go if you want to find out current U.S. newspaper circulation figures. Unfortunately, you have to be a member — they're not giving this sensitive information away — and so it's difficult to get up-to-the-minute data. You can find out the "Top 200 Newspapers by Largest Reported Circulation" (http://www.accessabc.com/reader/top150.htm), but not what those circulation figures actually are, and how they're trending.
But the ongoing decline in newspaper circulation in North America is not a well-kept secret, and if the ABC won't spill the beans, others will.
According to a February article in Media Life Magazine, "in the U.S., the circulation of paid-for papers dropped 4 percent from 2001 to 2005, hitting 53.3 million. It also dropped 2.3 percent in 2005 compared to the year earlier."
A May 2005 article in The Washington Post reported that "circulation at 814 of the nation's largest daily newspapers declined 1.9 percent over the six months ended March 31 compared with the same period last year…The decline continued a 20-year trend in the newspaper industry as people increasingly turn to other media such as the Internet and 24-hour cable news networks for information."
In the midst of this gloom, the February 17th issue of The Economist reported that in India there are some 300 big newspapers, and they experienced a 12.9% increase in circulation last year. Competition is fierce, and profits substantial.
The article also made reference to a key factor that may explain this bright news: Internet access is available to only 1.2% of Indians over the age of 12.
I remember years ago at a DRUPA trade show in Germany (DRUPA focuses on the printing business) meeting Naresh Khanna, the editor of Indian Printer & Publisher magazine. That year everyone was speculating about the possible impact of the Internet, but Naresh said to me: "Oh, we don't care very much about the Internet in India. We're just excited that we'll soon have color pictures in our newspapers."
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