Clearly, many of the 110 million people who visit newspaper websites, probably half, aren’t print subscribers, and many do so regularly. And all I need are 11 million Web readers to get newspapers’ audience back to where they were in 2000. I’m ready to discount Web traffic a lot, but not by 90 percent.
So in a technical sense, and in a real sense, newspapers’ audience is expanding.
Alan says in a note:
It is proper to say that lots of people look at newspaper articles from time to time. But occasional perusal - driven by a search engine or through social media - is not the same as consistent, persistent paid readership.
No doubt. Let’s call it a disagreement over the definition of audience.
I’m not saying that those numbers are something to write home about; just that the audience for local newspapers is larger than it used to be, including Web traffic, and probably significantly larger.
Does this make newspapers great? No. Does this make their future bright? No. Does the industry use its comScore figures to kid itself? No doubt it does.
And it’s undeniable, as Alan suggests below, that on a relative basis, newspapers are indeed shrinking.
But the absolute numbers count, too, and here are a couple things to consider when considering newspaper audience and influence.
When Pew, or anyone else, says that people surveyed said they used the “Internet,” “social media,” “mobile devices,” or digital media as a “source” for local news, it does not mean that the news itself came from a non-legacy news organization. As we’ll see, the opposite is much more likely to be true.
Pew says, for instance:
Urban and suburban residents also use a wider variety of local news sources on a regular basis. Close to half of urban (45 percent) and suburban (51 percent) residents use a combination of traditional, online and mobile local news media to get their local news, compared with 38 percent of those living in small cities and 27 percent of rural residents.
But, the “online and mobile” local news media refers to the delivery device, not the source. The same goes for aggregators, described as “Web native” sources in the New York Times study.
As Pew’s Tom Rosenstiel tells me in a note:
Getting a precise count of how many people are getting content that originated in newspapers from survey data is quite difficult for a host of reasons.
If people are going to an aggregator such as Yahoo News or even Huffington Post, they may not recognize the original source for the content they access.
Similarly, if they are reading a wire service story they may not know how to categorize that. If they are accessing content through a search engine, such as Google, and clicking on multiple links, they similarly may not be able to recall or identify the “source” that produced that story.
Add to the challenge of separating source from platform is the challenge of language and categorization…who is an aggregator now? Who is an originator? As the technology expands, even describing different platforms or making sure that people understand the question becomes challenging.
Finally, there is the challenge that people do not do consume media the same way each day. Most Americans read newspapers and watch TV. What is shrinking is the daily or seven day a week consumer, because people have so many more options. Digital technology is a delivery system. It is sometimes, less often, a source. But these are difficult conceptual differences to capture in a national survey of a representative sample of the public.
Got it. Obviously, since newspapers still earn much more from print operations than digital, the fact that many may be getting news from mobile phones or tablets is not necessarily great news for them. The fact that newspapers’ core audience is aging and that only a fifth of younger readers get their news from print (though, as we’ll see, there’s a catch here) does not bode well either.
On the other hand, it doesn’t mean their audience is shrinking. The opposite is true.
Why is this important?
A lot depends on what you call a newspaper.
What you are saying is that news readership added up across all platforms is increasing and that most are coming to news organizations.
However, it is undeniable that readership of newspapers — the platform — is decreasing. I could give you tons of anecdotal evidence, just ask students at Columbia, but the hard numbers from the Audit Bureau of Circulation are well documented.
I only point this out because I found the headline misleading. You seem to imply that newspaper is the news organization itself. It is not. There's a 'paper' in there, and though traditionally it might have been true in the past, this is no longer the case. (I'm dear to terms like The Press, by the way, but semantics matters in this analysis, I think).
#1 Posted by Ivan Lajara, CJR on Thu 18 Oct 2012 at 03:58 PM
It seems to me that it's difficult to comment on this post without veering into business models and risk taking things off topic.
To torture a metaphor, what the newspaper business is going through now is sort of like an airplane in a steep dive. You have declines in revenue that mostly show no sign of slowing up. And the primary task, at least in the near term, is to flatten the dive out enough to keep from hitting the trees. The plane might continue at a reduced altitude, but at least it's still in the air. So far, there hasn't really been a consistent model for how to reach a new equilibrium.
For example, the fact that 25 percent of site visitors generate around 85 percent of page views popped up a couple of years ago, but it has only been recently that the effective specifics for implementing a paywall have started to come about even though the subject of paywalls is still a matter of heated debate.
An issue that also comes into play is that some of the brighter minds looking at the problem, people like Alan Mutter, tend to focus on how the changes affect large-scale chains such as Gannett, Media News, or whatever. And there's nothing wrong with that, except what seems to get lost is a distinction between what economists might call macro and micro levels. Mutter lives in the Bay Area, for example, and you don't hear much about distinctions between, say, the San Jose Mercury News and the Contra Costa Times. Things are usually considered in the aggregate.
An additional minor problem with this post is that it seems to make the mistake, common in the Silicon Valley, of equating audience size with revenue. This is the kind of issue that Facebook is having in that a billion users who generate $1 Billion per year in profit is not a particularly lucrative model. As Ken Doctor pointed out not long ago, businesses such as cable companies tend to pay a lot more attention to the amount of revenue generated per user.
#2 Posted by Perry Gaskill, CJR on Thu 18 Oct 2012 at 07:23 PM
I have two problems with this reckoning of the fate newspapers.
First is the choice of the year 2000 as representing "back in the day". Yes, the focus here is on the Internet, but it's important to see the Web not as an isolated digital "broadcast" phenomena, but as part of a continuum that starts with radio, heads into television, and truly flowers with networked personal computers and mobile devices. According to "Literacy in the United States
Readers and Reading Since 1880" (Kaestle, Damon-Moore, Stedman, and Tinsley), "In terms of the American population as a whole...daily newspaper reading has declined from the 80-90 percent range [in the 1930s] to the 50-60 percent range [by the 1990s], and to 36-42% today (by the figures you quote).
Second of course is the economics. A gazillion people tweet and read tweets. Twitter is at best marginally profitable. Until it consistently proves that it can make money, how can you prove that it matters?
#3 Posted by Thad McIlroy, CJR on Thu 18 Oct 2012 at 10:01 PM
Dean,
You posit your argument on shaky ground: "if the Pew study is at all representative."
Steve Buttry said it better than I can: "Pew doesn't understand the news ecosystem well enough to study it."
http://stevebuttry.wordpress.com/2010/01/16/pew-doesnt-understand-news-ecosystem-well-enough-to-study-it/
The claim that news in Baltimore emanates from the newspaper was spurious at best, and is certainly more so today than nearly three years ago.
Why do newspaper journalists follow so many people on Twitter and Facebook, read a slew of blogs every day, keep TVs running nonstop in the newsroom, and regularly show up in the server logs of local online news sites?
Well, those that are smart are doing that — because they know news is breaking on the Internet hours or even days before it'll ever make it into print. Increasingly, smart readers are doing the same.
Local Independent Online News Publishers around the country are successfully creating the future of reporting every day: locally owned and operated news outlets that directly serve their communities.
I've yet to seen any convincing evidence that newspapers can find a way to pay down their crushing debt loads while weathering the loss of most of their revenue. Classifieds aren't coming back to print, and neither are real estate or car ads. Certainly not department stores. Not to mention that they've cut their reporters even more quickly than the newshole. Anecdotally, many remaining subscribers pay out of habit rather than conscious choice.
The publishers who are building new businesses around local news will be the ones to not just survive, but thrive. They aren't freighted with legacy media's debts, executives who concentrate mostly on their retirement packages, and bureaucratic inertia centered on antiquated products and processes.
Instead, they're building healthy local businesses, and fixing the news while they're breaking it.
Dylan Smith
Chairman,
Local Independent Online News Publishers
Editor & Publisher,
TucsonSentinel.com
#4 Posted by Dylan Smith, CJR on Tue 23 Oct 2012 at 02:36 AM
Great article. Excellent points. And probably irrelevant unless we can solve the biggest problem that newspapers face.
Two words: Revenue stream.
I'm not saying there isn't a solution, but unless you can significantly monetize that growing audience, your article is actually telling us that the entire news eco-system is doomed precisely because newspapers are a sentinel species.
#5 Posted by Frank Taylor, CJR on Thu 25 Oct 2012 at 03:13 PM
Excellent piece. This perspective can't be overstated enough. Just because something is read on an electronic device, doesn't mean it originated there. It's an easy thing to forget, so thanks to CJR for the timely and necessary reminder.
#6 Posted by Sharon Geltner, CJR on Wed 31 Oct 2012 at 04:24 PM