The Atlantic published a report, The Collapse of Print Advertising in 1 Graph, on Wednesday which included this graph. Talk about a picture telling the story. The report has been widely reported online. It pulls no punches:
You sometimes hear it said that newspapers are dead. Now, $20 billion is the kind of “dead” most people would trade their lives for. You never hear anybody say “bars and nightclubs are dead!” when in fact that industry’s current revenue amounts to an identical $20 billion.
Pile the figures from the US on top of the figures released last week for local newspaper publisher Fairfax and you start to get a sense that it’s game on for the future of newspapers as we know them.
Regulars here will know that I have had doubts about the viability of newspapers for some years, certainly the viability in the context of mass distribution through newsagents. Publishers have addressed the viability question by holding the cover price down and causing newsagents to be fa4 worse off today in real terms than ten years ago. They have also addressed viability in terms of home delivery by not allowing newsagents to charge a delivery fee which addresses the real costs of landing a newspaper in a subscribers yard.
The share price of newspaper publishers, especially those earning the majority of their revenue from print, reflects the challenges of print.
All of this is important for newsagents to consider as they wait for News Limited to talk with them abut their plans for the future in terms of newspaper distribution.
I liked this paragraph from a report at Business Insider about The Atlantic report:
The good news is, contrary to the fears of some doomsayers (also generally people who worked for newspapers), the world has never been better informed. Thanks to blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Google, two billion online fact-checkers, and some amazing online news sites—including some run by newspapers—we now know more faster than at any time in history, by a mile.