Will all news end up on the Web?
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Newspapers around the world are trying to make their peace with the Internet, but in the case of the world’s oldest newspaper, it amounted to a total surrender.
The Associated Press reported on Monday that, as of Jan. 1, Sweden’s Post-och Inrikes Tidningar “has dropped its paper edition and now exists only in cyberspace.”
The paper — the name means Post and Domestic Newspaper — was started in 1645 and is considered the planet’s oldest, continuously published newspaper by the World Association of Newspapers. It’s 11 years older than the second oldest, Netherlands’ Haarlems Dagblad.
The Post-och isn’t much of a newspaper these days. It has a circulation of about 1,000 and it carries only legal announcements. Nonetheless, Hans Holm, who was chief editor of the Post-och for 20 years, told the AP that he considers the change from paper to pixels to be “a cultural disaster.”
In truth, it is just another skirmish in the newspaper industry’s struggle to keep its product relevant in an age where the Internet is rapidly changing long-established traditions. People are increasingly doing everything from shopping to sightseeing to socializing on the Internet, and that trend is not likely to be reversed.
Some industries adapted fairly quickly and quite well — for example, large retailers found that profits are profits whether consumers did their business in a bricks-and-mortar store or at a “www” store.
I just read a story yesterday in the Washington Post about a company that has created a marketing sensation by merging the traditional stuffed-animal toy with the Internet. The Webkinz are “huggable, plush toys with elaborate virtual lives” that erase the gap between the playroom and the computer screen. The title of the article says it all: “Teddy Bear, Version 2.0.”
But newspapers have faced a sterner challenge. They rightly felt compelled by the tide of technology to carve out a space on the Internet, but quickly found that people simply were not willing to pay to read online news. But allowing people to read a newspaper for free online meant they had less reason to buy the print edition. That’s a nasty trap.
And people really like reading newspapers online. Just yesterday, the Newspaper Association of American released a study showing that “monthly unique visitors to newspaper Web sites averaged more than 57.6 million in the fourth quarter 2006, a record number and the largest in any quarter since NAA began tracking online usage in January 2004.”
By “unique visitors,” the NAA means people who read a newspaper online who did not read the print edition of that same newspaper. A few newspapers, like the Wall Street Journal, are successfully charging people to read their online editions. Others, like the New York Times, decided to charge only for certain “premium” features like columnists or archives.
But the “news” in the vast majority of online newspapers costs nothing more than the energy it takes to type in a Web address. In fact, Jennifer Saba, in an article last month in Editor & Publisher cited a report showing that by 2010, “35 percent of all broadband households will have likely terminated their newspaper subscriptions.”
Of course, newspapers never did make the biggest chunk of their incomes from subscriptions. The money mostly comes from advertising. So far, income from online advertising has been growing steadily, but not nearly fast enough. Saba reports that online advertising rose to $638 million in the third quarter of 2006. That seems like a lot until you consider that print advertising revenue during that same period was $11.1 billion, and had declined 2.6 percent. Again, the title of Saba’s article says it all: “Can Online Ads Save Us?”
The answer isn’t clear yet. Newspapers are under attack from many sides — paper is expensive; people are reading less in general; other “news” sources such as cable TV can respond more quickly as news events unfold; blogs inject a blood-and-guts slant on the news that readers enjoy. The list is long.
I happen to be among those who think it would be a “cultural disaster” to lose the hold-in-your-hands newspaper — for me, nothing can replace the look and feel of a real newspaper.
At the same time, I read several newspapers online every day, and I have always been proud of the fact that The Sentinel was among the first newspapers in the country — and certainly among the very few small newspapers — to see the potential of the Internet and establish a Web site. We were online in 1995 and have worked steadily since then to keep the site both attractive and useful. It is still thrilling to me to receive e-mail about one of my columns from someone in Texas or California who read the column online.
At the same time, the print edition of The Sentinel is not just holding its own, but even growing in circulation at a time when so many newspapers are shrinking or closing.
Shockingly, Arthur Sulzberger, owner, chairman and publisher of the New York Times, last week told a reporter from the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz: “I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either. The Internet is a wonderful place to be, and we’re leading there.”
I may be a member of the last few generations who will want it both ways — online and on paper. But if they’re all going to go the way of the Post-och, then I hope it’s long after I’m out of here.
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Rich Lewis’ e-mail address is:
rlcolumn@comcast.net.
