The print media obituary thread

[Diable Rouge]

According to the online poll aggregator, Britain Elects, 26% of Britons surveyed obtain most of their news from Facebook. The BBC would still appear to be the main news provider, given the importance of TV news (33% for all channels) and online sources (23% for all news websites), but the overall implications of the drift towards social media are worrying, and the trust statistics would suggest that the networks should voluntarily subscribe to national press regulations:

https://mobile.twitter.com/britainel...11673335054336

[G-Man]

But when people say they obtain their news through FB (or Twitter or whatever), aren't they referring to shared links, which then refer to news media, including the traditional print media on their digital platforms? (aside from new Internbet media and fakew news sites, obviously.)

[Sam]

I was going to say the same. A fair amount of the news stories I read are from links I click on Twitter, Facebook or Wikipedia, but they're links which take me to the sites of the Guardian, Independent, Telegraph, New York Times, BBC, AP, Reuters etc ...

[Diable Rouge]

The link shows online news in fairly robust health, which addresses that point, but will people still be paying for physical editions in the decades to come? The New York Times appears to be bucking the trend since Trump's election, but I suspect political magazines will become the focus of in-depth reportage.

[Sam]

Ah, so it's not so much the media sources themselves that are in danger, but the physical medium of print. Yes, that sounds right. Some sort of oversight on the aggregators certainly seems like a conversation that needs to happen at some point soon, and probably will given the current/recent stories about Facebook fake news pages, Russian Twitter bots etc.

[Patrick Thistle]

The sooner some papers are dead the better

[G-Man]

Some research suggests that the decline of print will plateau. There will still be a market for print, but obviously much-diminished. Big titles and local/niche newspapers may survive, but they need a new model of deriving revenue from non-news sources. One way is to use the title as a brand as a means to sell stuff and services. That works better for very big titles and well-established niche publications.

[Paul S]

Some research suggests that the decline of print will plateau. There will still be a market for print, but obviously much-diminished. Big titles and local/niche newspapers may survive, but they need a new model of deriving revenue from non-news sources. One way is to use the title as a brand as a means to sell stuff and services. That works better for very big titles and well-established niche publications.

It won't completely die as some people - like myself - enjoy paper copies. I sit at a computer all day staring at a screen, so the last thing I want to do on the train home is to sit looking at another screen reading the news. Instead I like to have a newspaper, magazine or book in my hand as it feels like a break from work and gives my eyes a rest.

[WOM]

Sometimes it's not up to you (or willing readers, at all). When I was at The Globe and Mail, they discontinued service in some cities where the cost to deliver physical papers vastly outweighed the income it generated, both through sales and ad revenue. When it reaches the tipping point, they'll simply stop publishing the paper artifact.

[Sam]

Yes, exactly. Although perhaps in a country with the population density of the UK, where Paul is, that'll take longer to happen than it did in the case of the Globe and Mail.

[Janik]

Sometimes it's not up to you (or willing readers, at all).

Well, no, it is down to willing readers, if there are enough of them to give a legacy product some limited commercial viability. Even if it is niche. See the continued existence of vinyl records for that.

[ad hoc]

In some far flung foreign locations it's possible to buy the Guardian (for example) in a print on demand form. This seems to be increasingly a thing with books too.

[Janik]

What if there were no Benny Cemoli?