Old Media is Dying
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London, UK, 18 July, 2009. Traditional print media is struggling to survive with the ubiquity of the web, citizen reporters, and media habits we don’t even understand yet.
By now, you’ve undoubtedly heard of Matthew Robson, the 15-year old Morgan Stanley intern who wrote a revealing report of how young teenagers consume media. [br]
London, UK, 18 July, 2009. Traditional print media is struggling to survive with the ubiquity of the web, citizen reporters, and media habits we don’t even understand yet.
By now, you’ve undoubtedly heard of Matthew Robson, the 15-year old Morgan Stanley intern who wrote a revealing report of how young teenagers consume media. [br]
“No teenager that I know of regularly reads a newspaper,” Robson claims.
Nor do they watch TV, use the phone, or even use Twitter. They turn to online sources for all their information and entertainment.
Robson didn’t even comment on magazines or books – perhaps they are so far off his radar they were not worth mentioning.
PC Magazine has already died as a printed publication, (its last issue was in January) and in April Condé Nast announced it would close its $100 million business publication, Portfolio.
Others are set to follow. Publishing giant McGraw-Hill is trying to unload BusinessWeek while Forbes slashed jobs earlier this year.
The world’s largest publisher of consumer books, Random House, announced widespread reorganization to cut costs late last year.
Simon & Schuster, another major publisher, cut 35 jobs in December of 08. And the publisher of adult division of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt quit in protest of a freeze on new book acquisitions. [br]
A report from the Magazine Publishers of America brought bad news for offline publishers: Ad revenue dropped by more than one fifth over the last year.
Fortune‘s revenues were down by a massive 43%, Forbes revenues were 35% down, and BusinessWeek ad dollars were 30% lower.
While Robson warns of new consumption habits, these revenue cuts are a result of the struggling economy. Most advertisers have cut their budgets across the board, while others are moving to an online market to stretch their ad spend.
“Advertising in print is all about output, circulation size,” said Ian Thomas, marketing manager of a large fashion label. “Online advertising is more about outcome, which means we can adjust our spending accordingly and get more measurable results.”
These publications are not dying altogether, as most go online after ending their print form. But as they move away from print they take many causalities in the form of jobs.
Citizen reporting is becoming a new source of real-time news updates with microblogging services such as Twitter.
One example of this is the May 2008 earthquake in China in which people in China announced the tremors as they happened. People around the globe knew before the USGS Website had announced it, and an hour before any major press let the headlines out.
Such immediate announcements render most printed reports almost useless, unless you are one of the last to know by reading the early edition. Either way, print media is under pressure to perform in these fast-paced digital times.
Hiroko Mirafiori, EconomyWatch.com
