Newspapers Going Going Gone

By Stephen Pate – Newspapers in North America and Europe struggle to stay alive as their readership and advertising revenue decline to the point of bankruptcy for some.

At the same time, free news from Huffington Post dominates with nearly 100 million readers.

Just like Netflix replaced DVD rentals and sales and potentially cable TV with unlimited video streaming for $8 a month,  low or no-cost streaming news will replace most newspapers.

Except for the faithful older subscribers, newspapers could easily disappear today as a major source of news.  Millennials, people born after 1980, get their news from computers and increasingly from mobile devices like smartphones, tablets and laptops.

Free news aggregators like Huffington Post and BuzzFeed are so popular that traditional newspapers like the New York Times are barely on the radar screen.

It’s humiliating for traditional newspapers but it does show Millennials have abandoned them. Only USA Today is surviving by its national distribution and popular content.

The business model for newspapers is too costly to survive. Huffington Post and BuzzFeed use bloggers, most of them unpaid, for journalists. Newspapers have too much invested in bricks and mortar and expensive staff.

Surveys cite the convenience of news all the time and zero cost as the major reasons Millennials have moved on.

Despite meetings like the Newspapers Canada conference last week in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, it’s unlikely most newspapers will survive the seismic shift in news media.

Newspapers are attempting to make the transition to small screen formats;  however, even there they seem out-of-date.  Newspapers are trying to squeeze their big page format into a 4.5&Prime screen.

Others say mobile newspapers are not popular because they are not readable and the publishers have erected paywalls.

After a decade of free internet news, the paywall newspaper is only bringing small revenue to publishers and it is not replacing lost advertising and subscriber revenue.

Paywalls leak. It’s easy to get around a paywall since they rely on a cookie or other file placed on the readers computer. Delete the cookie and the newspaper does not know if someone has read 1 or 20 stories.

Publishers with an attitude of entitlement are finding their old readers deaf to their profit problems.

“I think most people expect in this industry this is a private business,” said Charlottetown Guardian News Editor Wayne Thibodeau. “It needs to make money. We make no apologies for that.”

Business is not a charity and readers are not interested in supporting newspapers simply because the papers have a profit motive.

The Paywall model is simply not sustainable. If you like to read 3 or 4 papers online, the cost can be $80 to $100 monthly.  Few readers feel a debt of gratitude that big.

Newspapers, once a cash-cow that spewed profit from every pore, are losing subscriber revenue. Adding insult to injury  advertising revenues have been gutted.

Kijiji has replaced the want-ad with free online advertising.  Your next job will not be found in your local daily newspaper but online with dozens of job sites.  People sell houses on with free Kijiji ads.

Focusing on local news that is not covered by national and international free sources can save local papers. However, even there newspapers face competition from citizen journalists who blog the news for free.

In many cases, non-traditional sources of news, such as PEI’s Red Like Me are reporting stories and scandals the more conservative newspapers refuse to print.

Big newspapers will survive, but how is up for grabs.  Think of the recording industry as a model of how revenues decline in a digital economy.

A 12-song CD cost $20 in 1999 and was replaced by the iTunes $9.99 MP3 album.  With streaming music services like Spotify subscribers get unlimited songs for $5 to $10 a month.  iTunes is reporting its first drop in sales since it started which is one of the reasons Apple bought Beats as a new entrant in the streaming music business.

Follow me on Twitter at @sdpate or on Facebook at NJN Network, OyeTimes and IMA News Buzz.  Video and photo copyright CBC allowed use under Copyright Act.

By Stephen Pate, NJN Network