Has the decline of print media been greatly exaggerated?

The print media will live on because of its limitations as much as its strengths, argues William Powers in Hamlet’s Blackberry: Why Paper is Eternal, a discussion paper from the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University. For concentrated reading of longer articles, essays and books, free of distractions, there’s nothing like this old-fashioned medium, Powers argues – and he’s convinced me.

But what about everyone else? A new US survey conducted for Deloitte by the Harrison Group reports, “Nearly three-quarters of respondents prefer a printed version of a magazine even if they could get the same information online,” reports Deloitte. Significantly, that proportion is “consistent across the generations”. The survey – summarised in The Future of the Media: Profiting from Generational Differences with some additional detail on the Deloitte website – involved 2200 individuals aged 13–75.

Three quarters of respondents “find Internet ads more intrusive than print ads, and 64% pay more attention to print ads than those online”, the survey found. “Interestingly, the Gen-X sector (ages 25–41) found online ads more intrusive (79%) than baby boomers (72%). Gen-Xers also paid more attention to print ads (67%) than boomers (65%).” (Powers provides more data on this key point in Hamlet’s Blackberry.)

Meanwhile, the decline in overall newspaper sales seems to be tapering off, or even reversing slightly, in Australia and comparable western countries. In their 2004 book, How Australia Compares, Rodney Tiffen and Ross Gittins showed that the big decline in total newspaper sales in Australia occurred in the 1990s and was mainly driven by the fall in the number of titles as a result of the closure of papers like the Melbourne Herald and the Sydney Mirror. Their figures are in the first three columns of the chart below.

The 2007 edition of the World Association of Newspapers’ World Press Trends, which arrived by email overnight, provides the latest circulation figures from around 100 countries, which are in the last column below. Some of the figures seem surprisingly positive, and to some extent will reflect the difficulties of collecting up-to-date information and making international comparisons. But the overall message is that – in terms of print circulation anyway – newspapers have at least some breathing space to plan for a difficult future.

One of the ways newspapers are using this breathing space is to develop ways of calculating combined print/online circulation figures. The Australian industry has begun releasing figures simultaneously for print and web but there are practical difficulties in integrating the two sets of figures. To try to come to grips with this problem, the World Association of Newspapers has established the Media Measurement Integration Task Force, an international coalition of media organisations which will “explore and communicate the opportunities to measure and report newspaper audiences across multiple platforms to newspaper industry stakeholders”.

And one final piece of print news, a reverse colonisation of sorts: The Sunday Times reports that Google Print Ads, currently available in the US, will spread to British papers soon. The ads – an extension of Google AdWords – let advertisers “pick a newspaper online through Google and enter a bid for available advertising space on a given page and day,” reports the newspaper. “But rather than offering to pay the list price, customers say what they are prepared to pay. Publishers can choose to accept or decline the offer.”

Total newspaper circulation per thousand population

Sources: How Australia Compares, Rodney Tiffen and Ross Gittins, Cambridge University Press, 2004; World Press Trends 2007, World Association of Newspapers, 2007