WebProNews

Tag: print media

  • Rupert Murdoch Predicts the Demise of Print Media

    Rupert Murdoc has predicted that there will be no newspapers in ten years time, saying internet competition and government overregulation will lead to its demise, The Gaurdian is reporting.

    Murdoch, News Corps chairman and chief executive begged Lord Justice Leveson for “some care” in his decision for the future of press regulation in the UK. The inquiry comes after News of the World phone-hacking scandal.

    “We’re dealing in a very complex world with disruptive technologies, and we’re suffering at the hand of those, so when it comes to regulation, I just beg for some care,” he said to the Leveson inquiry in London on Thursday. “A varied press guarantees democracy and we want democracy rather than autocracy.”

    Murdoch claims that newspapers are under extreme pressure from the internet. While some, himself included, still prefer to actually hold a paper in their hand, this dying breed will not last forever.

    “Every newspaper has had a very good run… It’s coming to an end as a result of these disruptive technologies. I think we will have both for quite a while, certainly ten years, some people say five. I’d be more inclined to say 20, but 20 means very small circulations.” Adding, “I think you have a danger of regulating, putting regulations in place which will mean there will be no press in 10 years to regulate.”

    “The fact is, the internet came along, slowly developed as a source of news, and now is absolutely in our space and I think it’s been responsible for a lot of loss of circulation.”

  • People Ditching Print Media, Spending More Time On Phones, Internet

    According to research firm eMarketer, it has finally happened. U.S. Adults are officially spending more time on their smartphones than they are reading newspapers and magazines combined.

    This year’s figures show that the average adult is spending an hour and five minutes on their mobile device, but only 26 minutes reading a newspaper and an even less amount of time reading magazines (18 minutes). Combined, traditional print media is taking up 44 minutes of your day, a full 21 minutes less than mobile activities.

    Time spent on mobile devices is up a whopping 30% from last year. Generic “internet” time is also up, 7.7% to be exact from two hours and 35 minutes to two hours and 47 minutes.

    TV and video still rules the average adult’s day, however. Despite a small drop from 2009 to 2010, time spent watching the tube increased from 264 minutes to 274 minutes in 2011.

    It’s important to note that the “time spent doing X” data is not exclusive to X. “Time spent with each medium also includes all time spent with that medium, regardless of multitasking, so an hour of watching TV while simultaneously on the internet is considered an hour of each activity.” So the rise of time spent online could have something to do with the rise in time spent on mobile devices, and vice versa.

    So what do we take from this? Really, this confirms the general notion that print media is falling off a bit. Of course, mobile time increasing doesn’t necessarily mean that people are forgoing the news to play Angry Birds all day. Mobile and internet use increases probably means that people are just choosing to get their news online.

    It is also interesting to see the TV and video usage rise this year. Since the eMarketer data limited this to a “traditional television set,” this could mean that fears about everyone “cutting the cable cord” could be unjustified. Or, this rise could be attributed to increases in streaming video services’ availability, like Netflix and Hulu on Xbox and PS3 consoles.

    Another interesting find from the study concerned ad dollars. Most of the U.S. ad spending shares correlate almost perfectly with the percentage of time the average adult spends on the specific media. For instance, TV takes up 42.5% of the average adult’s day, and it receives 42.2% of the ad dollars.

    The only discrepancy is when you look at ad dollars spent on mobile and print. I’ll let you take a took for yourself, but it appears that ad spending might be a little behind the times.

    While print is clearly not “dead,” this data confirms that people are moving in the opposite direction. Have you noticed that your mobile and internet consumption has cut into your print media consumption? Let us know in the comments.

  • The New Yorker Promotes Facebook Only Content

    One of the biggest, if not the most important issue in journalism right now is the transition into the digital age.  Venerable print news outlets are struggling with the onslaught of readily available, free information on the internet.  The ones that have any chance of surviving have to stay relevant in a rapidly changing journalism scene where everyone is a reporter, and sometimes our attention spans short out after 140 characters.

    Paywalls are always an iffy proposition, as outlets struggle to find a compromise that will keep readers loyal with fair pricing as well as generate revenue.  Newsday famously managed to attract 35 new subscribers in its first 3 months with a paywall.  Most recently, the New York Times’ institution of its paywall has also gone less than swimmingly.

    How do traditional journalistic outlets engage a new generation of readers?  Well, possibly through social media like Facebook.

    The New Yorker, the long-standing magazine filled with reporting, satire, fiction and commentary, has utilized their Facebook page to provide content only to people who “like” the page.  For a week, fans of the New Yorker will be able to read an exclusive article by novelist Jonathan Franzen.  The article is called “Farther Away: Robinson Crusoe, David Foster Wallace, and the island of solitude”  and involves Franzen rereading Robinson Crusoe, stranding himself on the supposed island that was the inspiration for the novel.

    Here is the announcement via Facebook:

    And here is the “fans only” page where the article is available:

    The New Yorker runs a semi-paywall where some articles are available on the site and some require a subscription to read.

    This kind of Facebook-only promotion isn’t new to media.  Artists like Lil Wayne, Jennifer Lopez and Kanye West have all released songs exclusively through Facebook.  It will be nice to see print media offer rewards more often for engaging through social media.

    Speaking to Bloggasm,  the New Yorker’s director of public relations Alexa Cassanos had this to say:

    We have a million subscribers, but we only – I shouldn’t say ‘only’ because it’s a great number – but we have about 200,000 fans on Facebook. Obviously we think that that number could be bigger. And we’d also like to have people ‘like’ us or engage with us who aren’t subscribers. Who are maybe fans of Jonathan Franzen, or who love fiction, or who like David Foster Wallace, or people who may have had no idea that The New Yorker was on Facebook.