Ivy King, a senior social work major, rarely reads newspapers anymore. She picks up a few headlines from her Blackberry phone, but does not rely on newspapers except for the coupon inserts.
“I just don’t want to buy them except for the Sunday paper for coupons,” King said.
King belongs to a current trend of citizens becoming further alienated from news print media. Newspapers are failing to bring in new readers, like King, and losing advertiser dollars at the same time.
Dr. Conrad Fink, director of the Cox Institute of Newspaper Management Studies, believes that more Americans are losing interest in quality journalism.
“I believe that Americans have disengaged from serious consideration of the compellingly important political, social and economic issues of the day,” said Fink.
Consumers are increasingly going online to find their news instead of buying the print version. The digital shift is a problem for newspapers primarily due to a lack of interest from the advertising sector.
Newspapers typically draw 75-80 percent of their revenue from advertising rather than sales and subscriptions. On the other hand, advertisers depend on newspapers largely because of their ability to penetrate households fitting into specific demographic or psychographic categories. Advertisers only want to reach people that might buy their products.
Online news consumers spent an average of just 28 minutes over the entire month of June at the New York Times’ website, which is the most successful online publication. If the readers that have switched to online publications are spending very little time viewing news, then advertisers will not have much of a chance at reaching potential customers.
The public shift to preferring online news over print begs the question: why? Citizens who have taken that shift complain the major reason for not reading the newspaper is that there simply isn’t enough time in the day. With busy work schedules or responsibilities with their children, adults find less and less time to spend doing other activities during the day, including reading news.
Less time for certain activities means quicker solutions in our fast-paced society. Translation: there is less value received from reading newspapers thoroughly than doing other things with individuals’ free time. Dr. Fink believes that news print management is somewhat at fault.
“We have lost our way,” said Fink.
The newspaper industry spent too much effort cutting costs in order to adapt to an ailing economy that they began neglecting valuable journalism, according to Fink. If newspapers fail to provide quality reporting, advertisers are not going to reach the right audiences and will give their business to newsprint’s competitors.
Former executive editor of the Athens Banner-Herald, Cecil Bentley, said paid advertising has been falling for years along with paid circulation.
“The Banner-Herald is still profitable as a newspaper, but they have lost paid advertising and paid circulation,” said Bentley.
Bentley didn’t think there had been much variation in total market coverage during his three years at the Banner-Herald, but much of the audience had shifted towards the digital publication. However, the advertising revenue gained from the Banner-Herald’s website did not adequately compensate for the advertising revenue lost on the print side of the spectrum, according to Bentley.
Much of the losses in advertising revenue could also be attributed to the poor state of the automobile, real estate and help-wanted sectors who are all big contributors to classified advertisement revenue.
The future of the newsprint industry will largely depend on its ability to reconcile print with online publication in an efficient manner to create greater household penetration. Greater household penetration will bring in more money from the advertising industry.
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When I spoke with Patrick on Wednesday, I learned that he is a great listener. When interviewing people, he listens more than he writes, which in turn makes him a little less confident about the quotes that he employs. Though he felt the story didn't flow as well as he wanted it to on the initial draft, I thought that Patrick's use of quotes was strong, and that information marked his story as well-researched. I learned statistics on reader retention, newspaper revenue and the audience who has little time for the newspaper in its current state.
ReplyDeleteThe changes that I suggested Patrick include some things that he was already planning on changing. I mentioned attributing some of the facts, and Patrick informed me he was already going back to talk to his source or consult materials for this or that. Small things, like not setting-up a quote with information that was essentially stronger when said by the source, were discussed. Changing the verbiage of a few sentences to make them less of assertions and more facts, or less proscriptive and more descriptive, was also discussed. I believe the source I suggested he contact was another professor to talk about readership studies. (Though I might have said another newspaper person about advertising revenues...)
All in all, I tend to put a lot of ink to paper when I edit other people's work, but Patrick's story had all the makings of a well-written, informative piece that needed only a little tweaking.