Will 2009 see the death of the press?

9Dec08

I have been maintaining for a while now that we are at a turning point in media and marketing history. The

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rise on web-based media has accelerated in recent years while traditional media has begun to show serious signs of erosion. One of the most serious economic downturns in modern history seems to be contributing to the traditional media model woes whilst we simultaneously witness the rise and rise of micro-media.

A flood of recent news items now appears to be pointing to the fact that print media will be the first to fall, or at least suffer near-fatal wounds.

In the US a string of print publications have ceased to exist or ceased to print in the last few months. AdAge.com asked:

Will Print Survive the Next Five Years?
The print business was horrified enough last week when The Christian Science Monitor revealed plans to fold its 100-year-old daily print edition in favor of the web and a weekly print product. But by the end of one of the worst weeks in the history of newspapers and magazines, the Monitor was starting to look like one of the few places publishing could turn for even a dim ray of hope.

Within weeks Advertising Age reported that PC Magazine was the latest monthly magazine to quit print and become a purely digital operation. The January issue will be its last print edition. This was the same day that another journal, Cottage Weekly closed.

OK, so far you’ll be thinking that these are only weaker, more obscure periodicals going under or moving online, not the serious players. You’d be right. But where there’s smoke, there’s a mighty big blaze smoldering away just waiting for the winds of economic change to fan into a firestorm.

Today the beleaguered newspaper sector sunk to new depths as Tribune Co., publisher of the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, filed for bankruptcy protection. The publishers cited a ‘perfect storm’ of tough economy and revenue decline.

Journalists here in Australia now appear to be fanning the flames themselves. Today’s Sydney Morning Herald ran an article titled Ten Prophecies for the digital millennium. Amazingly the 9th point in the story by Graeme Philipson was predicting The Death of Newspapers.

Newspapers as we know them are in decline. Are you reading this in hard copy or online? Around the world, newspapers are shutting down or moving to the web. Blogs are replacing the mainstream media.

The profession of journalism, and the way we consume media and get our news, is being transformed. I’m not sure whether this is a good or bad thing, but there’s no doubt it’s happening.

A Fairfax journalist said Blogs are replacing the mainstream media?!! I have been to several media conferences this year where journalists argued black and blue that this was not the case, while new media evangelicals merrily predicted a changing of the guard.

While even I was little sceptical about the rate of change and imminent demise of traditional media being argued by some, the evidence certainly appears to be mounting. Against the backdrop of failing print media companies we hear that new media darling The Huffington Post now has a higher market valuation than many of its old-world predecessors.

AdAge:
The (new funding and valuation) means Arianna Huffington’s news blog is now considered more valuable by its backers than quite a few publicly traded newspaper companies, such as Lee Enterprises, owner of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and 52 other papers (market cap: $36 million), A.H. Belo, owner of the Dallas Morning News and the Providence Journal (market cap: $35 million), and Media General, owner of the Tampa Tribune and Richmond Times-Dispatch (market cap: $34.6 million).

It puts Huffington Post in the same league as McClatchy Corp., owner of the Sacramento Bee, Miami Herald and 28 other dailies (market cap: $150 million). In a press release, Huffington Post said it will use the funds from Oak Investment Partners for acquisitions, an “investigative journalism initiative” and localized versions, which will no doubt be even more dependent on the resident struggling local dailies such as in Chicago, where it already has a local site.

And that’s just one online model that is growing and adding to the traditional press woes. Micro-blogging platforms such as Twitter have become the default news feed for many social media fans.

The immediacy and ease of access of micro-blogging means that events can be relayed instantaneously around the world as was seen in the recent Mumbai terrorist attacks. Mumbai signaled a change in news delivery as people on location Tweeted the events as they happened, and well in advance of traditional media. Even the venerable New York Times had to admit that new media Twitterers led the way:

“When you look at TV, you see one channel at a time, then you go to another channel,” said Dina Mehta, an ethnographer and social media consultant in Mumbai. “On Twitter, you get feeds from many different people at the same time.”Citizen journalists avoided some of the bureaucratic headaches faced by media organizations. At the end of the day on Friday, CNN’s license to transmit live video in India expired, forcing the network’s correspondents to report via telephone. CNN and other channels in the United States relied on live coverage and taped reports from Indian networks.

This is what the new media evangelists were talking about at the aforementioned media conferences. New technology and distribution networks are beginning to replace the traditional news delivery models. Why wait for a news bureau to get a reporter in place and file a report when you can follow the news as it happens with first hand coverage by citizen journalists?

The once powerful Fourth Estate no longer controls the flow of information. The rise and rise of micro media combined with the Perfect Storm of economic pressures and declining readership is leading to the death of the press. It may not happen in 2009 but it seems certain now that print media will either cease to be the force it once was or cease to exist.

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