Media tyrant mogul Rupert Murdoch has for some time now been shouting about the virtues of newspapers on tablet devices - his organs have been promoting the iPad and a shift behind paywalls is on the way. Indeed, only The Sun is free to view at the moment but that is set to change soon too.
According to media industry analysts at Future Exploration Network he could be making the right move. The Grauniad has spent a great deal of dosh on ensuring it has quality journalists pushing out a lot of content on a daily basis, but has lost money through its free model. Future Exploration's paper suggests that traditional media could be dead as early as 2017 in certain regions of the world.
In its Newspaper Extinction Timeline, it reveals that the emergence of tablet devices and other ways of viewing the news will see the extinction of traditional newspaper media by 2017 in America. It is followed by the UK and Iceland where the funeral is set for 2019, then Canada and Norway at 2020.
But the figures are broadly one sided. While the USA, Canada, the UK, Australia and much of Scandinavia are keen for a media shift, Europe as a whole isn't fussed - with Italy hitting the extinction period in 2027, while France is 2029 and Germany is 2030. They are followed by Japan and Metropoltan China in 2031.
"Every country is different," says chairman of Future Exploration Network Ross Dawson, "The pace of change in media structure is being led by the US and UK, with other countries not so far behind." It's a tough one to pigeonhole: while the digital charge is being led by North America and the West, traditionaly newspapers are gaining further credibility and output in developing countries.
And nine years is, in terms of a business, a long time for a paywall to generate a decent ROI. All figures must be taken with a pinch of salt - Future Exploration Network doesn't tell us the exact ins and outs. In its notes it says: "This schedule for newspaper extinction shows best estimates given current trends."
You can have a look at the prediction graphic here if our resized one, below, is too small, which it is.
to wit:
Wilkinson: accept that newspapers are dying, now do something positive , says Roy G.
'' I posted yesterday on the astonishingly bold - and arguably, foolish - prediction by Ross Dawson that newsprint will die in Britain in 2019, ahead of the death of newspapers in a further 51 countries by 2040.'' MORE
This attracted, unsurprisingly, a lot of sceptical comment. Piet Bakker's response, on the thread, was the most trenchant:
It's basically crap, no data are given, and what is 'insignificant'. Serious journalism should not fall for B.S. like this.
That summed up many people's feelings, I'm sure. (Incidentally, though I didn't say it, I am convinced that there will be plenty of newspapers in Britain in 2019. I may agree that we're marching slowly towards the death of papers, but Dawson's time-scale is hopelessly wrong).
Anyway, Earl Wilkinson, the executive director and chief executive of INMA (International Newsmedia Marketing Association), has reacted by taking Dawson's forecast at face value.
So, in his blog, he asks, What would you do today if you knew when your print newspaper would die? How different would your choices be if you had seven years of life versus 30 years?
Wilkinson accepts that Dawson is "mostly correct" though the dates, "are too aggressive." He writes:
We cannot escape the external factors shaping how information is consumed. We cannot escape the pace of technological change. We cannot escape the nature of consumer behaviour...
What I like about Dawson's nudge is that it reminds us that the clock is ticking. We can't work fast enough at the corporate level or the industry level to develop digital platforms that connect with readers and advertisers.
We can't work fast enough to build multi-media companies where print, online, mobile, iPad and others each play to their strengths and interact.
Just as we were warned in the 1990s that classified advertising could disappear and we need to prepare for that, we need to be preparing today for an all-digital future — whether that comes in 2025, 2050, 2100, or some year beyond the reach of our great-grandchildren.
Wilkinson then challenges publishers to take steps to transform their business models "to preserve today's level of journalism at a sufficiently profitable level."
He concludes: "If a few dates assigned to something we're already focused on contribute 1% additional urgency to our industry's transformation from print to multi-media and the structure of our news ecology... then we can thank Ross Dawson for his contribution."
[this note approved of by Roy Greenslade:]
I’ve been working in and around newspapers for most of my life, beginning as a newspaper-delivery boy in western Massachusetts, in the 1950s.
During my teenage years, the massive edition of the Sunday New York Times would arrive at the doorstep with a welcome thud, and I’d spend the rest of the morning devouring every section of the paper, lying on the carpet of the living room.
This was a good 40 years, of course, before the Internet shook up my world, and maybe your world, too. You see, the print newspaper that you might be holding in your hands now is headed for the garbage heap of history by 2025, maybe sooner. Well, at least that’s what the doomsayers say as the Digital Age stands up proud with its Kindles and state-of-the-art iPhone e-reading apps and says good riddance to paper.
But wait a minute, I want to say, hold your horses! Print newspapers are not dead yet, and they don’t have to die. As the American writer and newspaper publisher Dave Eggers has said, there’s no reason that print newspapers and online news sites cannot co-exist.
I love print newspapers so much because, yes, of course, I grew up with them. Early life in Springfield, college years in Boston.
For the young generation today growing up with Facebook and Twitter and YouTube, it’s a totally different story, and I understand that story, too. I also have a Facebook page and a Twitter account, so I am not against pixels or E Ink or screengrabs. I just love “snailpapers,” that’s all, and I use that word as a term of endearment, as you will see.
Recently, I wrote a novelty song about newspapers called “I Just Can’t Live (Without My Daily Snailpaper)”. You can find it on YouTube. The reviews have been mixed. First the good news.
Diana McClellan, a retired Washington, D.C., gossip columnist who rose to fame at the now-defunct Washington Star — defunct, in fact, since 1981 (it had a 128-year run, beginning in 1852) — listened to the video and told me: “This is the world’s first musical obit for newspapers!”
Carl Bernstein’s in the song, in the second verse (along with Bob Woodward and Ben Bradlee, their boss at The Washington Post during Watergate days), and after he listened to it, he told me in a brief e-mail about a week later: “Your newspaper love song is delightful, the message is right and your voice is on target.”
Full disclosure: The dude singing the song is not me. I hired a retired dentist in Texas named J. Gale Kilgore to record the song in his home studio and a video firm to make the scrolling lyrics video.
Jeffrey Jolson-Colburn, publisher and editor of the online news site Hollywood Today (and the grandson of Al Jolson, by the way), said the lyrics resonated with him. “I’ve been publisher or editor of 12 newspapers, about half of them print newspapers and half of them online news sites. I wish all were print papers. I’ve got ink in my veins. However, online is only way to stay alive now.”
But not everyone agrees with the song’s intent. Every song has its critics.
I asked a young woman in Australia, screen name Bella Kyee, who I met by chance on Facebook, if she reads any newspapers Down Under and if had any advice on how to help the song go viral on the Internet. She replied in a succinct one-line note, which I reproduce here in its entirety, verbatim: “Noooo! . . . I don’t do newspapers . . . HAHAHA!”
Will print newspapers survive the current onslaught of the Digital Age? I don’t know the answer, but I sure hope they do.
I am not anti-Internet and I am not a Luddite, all humor in my song aside. I embrace digital as much as I embrace paper and print. E Ink is amazing. The blogosphere lights up my life 24/7. I can’t imagine a world without computers or screens or iPods or iPads, and while the coming roll-out of Apple’s iPad might put several more nails in the coffin of print newspapers, I still want to stand up for newspapers and say: “Long may they live!”
So what is the purpose of my song? Hopefully, it will prod newsroom people and news consumers and Brown and Tufts professors to reflect on just where the future of good journalism lies. Like Dave Eggers, I feel it lies in both paper and on screens.
As for the term “snailpapers” that I coined for the song, Paul Gillin, of the Newspaper Death Watch blog, said it well: “[Bloom] thinks maybe if newspapers poked more fun at themselves instead of getting all righteously indignant about new media, they would generate more sympathy.”
It’s true. Print newspapers arrive on our doorsteps in the morning with news that is already perhaps six hours old. That’s a snailpaper, by definition.
But as the song says, “I just can’t live without my daily snailpaper!”
Can you?
November 11, 2010
Dear Ross,
According to your analysis of the future of printed newspapers, they are slated to go the way of the dodo bird in the next ten years in some advanced industrial and gadget-addicted countries, followed by further extinctions of daily snailpapers -- printed on dead-tree newsprint -- later this century. Your keen analysis suggests that traditional media could be dead as early as 2017 in certain regions of the world, according to your gone-viral Newspaper Extinction Timeline, which reveals that the emergence of tablet devices and other ways of "screening" the news will see the extinction of traditional newspaper media by 2017 in the USA, followed by the UK and Iceland -- where the funeral is set for 2019 -- and then Canada and Norway in 2020.
Italy's snailpapers go extinct, you say, in 2027, while France goes in 2029 and Germany in 2030. They are followed by Japan, Taiwan and China in 2031.
"Every country is different," you tell me. "The pace of change in media structure is being led by the US and UK, with other countries not so far behind."
Roy Greenslade at the Guardian in the UK has posted his reaction to the dodo bird timeline, quoting Earl Wilkinson of the International Newsmedia Marketing Association, who blogged: “What would you do today if you knew when your print newspaper would die?”
Mr Greenslade, as you know, posted a thinkpost on what he called your "astonishingly bold - and arguably, foolish - prediction ... that newsprint will die in Britain in 2019, ahead of the death of newspapers in a further 51 countries by 2040."
Mr Greenslade noted that, naturally, your PR hype attracted, not surprisingly, a lot of skeptical comment. Piet Bakker's response, on the thread, was the most trenchant, Greenslade said, quoting Mr Bakker's two-line shout-out: "It's basically crap, no data are given, and what is 'insignificant'. Serious journalism should not fall for B.S. like this."
Mr Greenslade's take-home is that Bakker's rant summed up many people's feelings. But he confessed himself, saying, in parentheses: "Incidentally, though I didn't say it, I am convinced that there will be plenty of newspapers in Britain in 2019. I may agree that we're marching slowly towards the death of ["snailpapers"], but Dawson's time-scale is hopelessly wrong."
But to be fair and balanced, Mr Greenslade also quoted an industry expert, Earl Wilkinson, executive director and chief executive of the International Snailpaper Marketing Association, as saying: "What I like about Dawson's nudge is that it reminds us that the clock is ticking. We can't work fast enough at the corporate level or the industry level to develop digital platforms that connect with readers and advertisers.
We can't work fast enough to build multi-media companies where print, online, mobile, iPad and others each play to their strengths and interact.
Just as we were warned in the 1990s that classified advertising could disappear and we need to prepare for that, we need to be preparing today for an all-digital future — whether that comes in 2025, 2050, 2100, or some year beyond the reach of our great-grandchildren."
Greenslade then quoted Wilkinson's money quote, which is worth repeating here: "If a few dates assigned to something we're already focused on contribute 1 percent additional urgency to our industry's transformation from snailpaper to multi-media and the structure of our news ecology... then we can thank Ross Dawson for his contribution."
Now, Ross, there is one thing you have overlooked entirely, and this gaffe is huge and possibly world-shaking. Please listen to me carefully here, because nobody is saying what I am about to say, and the few people who have heard me say it already on countless blogs and comment sections, think my elevator does not go all the way to the top and that I'm paddling around the lake in circles in a rowboat with only one oar in the water. Be that as it may, Ross, please listen to me here and respond later. The very future of civilization is at stake.
It's this: Ross, WHAT IF, what if reading off screens -- what Marvin Minksy at MIT calls "screen-reading" and what I call "screening" -- is vastly inferior, in terms of brain chemistry and neuroscience, to reading text on paper surfaces? WHAT IF, what if reading on paper surfaces is real reading and reading off screens is faux-reading? WHAT IF, what if reading on paper surfaces -- a book, a newspaper, a magazine -- is vastly superior to "screening" off screens -- computers, iPhones, iPads, BlackBerrys, nooks, Crannies, you name it! -- in terms of information processing, information retention, information analysis and, perhaps most importantly, Ross, critical thinking skills?
This is my hunch, and WHAT IF, what if I am right? I might be wrong, too. Maybe reading on paper and screening off screens is the same. But what if my hunch, backed up by personal anecdotal experiences and the experiences of several top experts in the field, from Anne Mangen in Norway to Maryanne Wolf at Tufts and Gary Small at UCLA, what if my hunch is later proven to be true by concerted neuroscience research using (f)MRI and PET brain scan studies that just might indicate that different regions of the brain light up when we read on paper compared to when we "screen" off screens, and that these differences show that reading on paper is superior to screen-reading for the four items noted above: processing, retention, analysis and critical thinking?
What then, Ross?
All I am saying is: give paper a chance! Test out my hunch before it is too late. Ask Drs Mangen and Wolf and Small. WHAT IF, again, what if it turns out that all these screen platforms that allow us to "view" news through plastic or glass screens are inferior -- again, in terms of neuroscience and brain chemisty -- to newsprint?
Because IF, if I am right, and future MRI and PET scan studies show that we have been barking up the wrong tree with this gadgethead fixation, then what? Cancel the digital revolution?
No way. As Gary Small has said: "The technology train has already left the station and there is no coming back."
But WHAT IF, what if my hunch turns out to have some air in it? What then?
Cheers, mate
Danny Bloom