A thoughtful contrarian voice is always useful, and I'm enjoying keeping an eye on the Inksniffer, the weblog of British newspaper consultant John Duncan. Two recent posts stand out. One is his Webster's Dictionary of Audience Exaggeration: How internet metrics promote the myth of the dying newspaper, and the other is his amusingly titled Why newspapers should get out of the internet business before it kills us all.
Duncan believes newspapers have abandoned print and are madly dashing off into a whole new business on the Internet with heavy investment and innovation focus, and he argues that's a bad thing.
We should be so lucky.
Newspapers are not abandoning print innovation to focus resources online. Print newspapers typically have no real innovation resources to begin with, and tend to focus on squeezing out as much quarterly operating profit as possible without a care for the future. And in general they've transferred that model to the Internet, along with a print-derived product model and business model. Small wonder they've had little success when put up against dotcom startups.
As for his criticism of Internet metrics, as I said in comments I posted to his blog, much of it is absolutely on target. I'm on record as having severely criticized my fellow onliners for tossing around meaningless and misleading monthly cumulative audience data, just as I've criticized the industry broadly for crowing about how print+online=growth when actual market penetration is measurably declining.
However, the notion that a newspaper's daily print sales figures should be multiplied by some factor to derive actual readers is wishful-thinking crap, and especially so in markets where the newspaper is home delivered, such as is typical in the United States. Try dividing! Once again, I ran over this morning's paper with my car on my way to work.
Readership declines are very real, and they're way ahead of circulation declines. Newspapers are getting tossed into driveways and front lawns, and left to collect dew and spiders until the next trash day.
Newspapers are severely abusing ABC rules on bulk sales, and many are carrying canceled subscribers on their books for as much as six months after being notified.
We don't have a medium-change problem so much as a content relevancy problem and a general failure to grasp the unique strengths of print and online and use each to best advantage.
We are not, overall, seeing a migration of readers from print to online consumption of news. If that were true, we should not be worried, as the economics of operating a news source online are actually fairly attractive IF you can get people to pay attention.
The much bigger problem is a general decline of interest in serious journalism, mingled with the rise of much better solutions for some of the jobs for which newspapers once were a preferred solution. (Selling a car, getting a job, and entertaining yourself would be obvious examples.)
Some of our problems can be fixed and some can't. The first step is to be honest with ourselves and to separate fact from our own PR spin.
Comments
Metrics and newspapers
I have to say I find myself agreeing with you.
As I mentioned in my original post I hate the hocus pocus of the National Readership Survey in the UK. You and a couple of other commenters have made me want to take a look at their methodology which I'm going to do next week.
The Guardian doesn't have the driveway problem and cancelled subscriber issue - the overwhelming majority, somewhere over 90%, buy it at a newsstand each day. But there are are still sleights of hand in the UK market too...
Using bulks and foreigns in the UK to obscure declines in full price is indeed a problem. That's why I discounted it in my calculations. But you're right to point out that such sales can help to obscure declining sales.
I agree that we are not seeing a migration of print readers to online newspaper sites. That's my whole point. I'm trying to convince newspaper publishers that they cannot afford to ignore their newspaper product's possibilities in the hope that their web presence will pay the bills in the fiuture. I don't believe it will. Maybe where we differ is in our belief in the possibilities to be explored in innovation in print.
Newspaper companies believe that their future is online. I believe that some of what they will do in the future is online but that the only way they can survive is to do print better and find ways to unleash their skills more effectively on the web.
You put it better yourself. We have "a general failure to grasp the unique strengths of print and online". Spot on.
Declining classified markets is a problem, but newspapers in the US deserve everything they get. Classified ads are expensive ugly and hard to search. Yet none of the papers has consideredd tackling those issues before giving up the ghost. It can't all be saved - but some of the best bits can, if you think hard about what you need to change about your print product.
Anyway, I appreciate your challenge and I hope my look at NRS next week will prove interesting...
A different disagreement
Actually, I don't disagree that there are important opportunities for innovation in print.
Our Bluffton project has garnered a lot of attention for its participation-focused Web component, which is easily visible to anybody with an Internet connection, but the print component is often overlooked. The truth is that the daily free printed product has been extraordinarily successful in its market, creating a powerful connection with its audience, and building very high readership including among young people.
My employer also has been having great success with a highly targeted print publication called Skirt that is being franchised to other newspaper companies, and with a number of market-specific specialty publications. We do more of that sort of thing than most other newspaper companies, although Gannett certainly has a powerful portfolio model in Phoenix.
If we disagree it's about the importance of continued investment in Internet services, which I think are still poorly developed at most newspapers. I think that if we take the NewspaperNext innovation model seriously and focus on local consumer needs, we'll discover a host of new opportunities on the Internet. Some of them may in fact compete with or obsolete what we've been doing in print, but we should be OK with that.