Newspapers Losing To The Internet (Jun 9, 2008)

Nowadays, you can read all kinds of news on Yahoo News and other specialized news websites where you can get the top stories often updated, as well as news and features that your local paper never bothers to report on.

For instance, The San Diego Union-Tribune never carries the syndicated Today in History feature by Associated Press.

Some people watch network TV for news, but that too is declining in the ratings. Even the news on the original big three networks and affilliates have seen their ratings fall as 24 hour cable news services came into being, with CNN beginning way back in 1980.

What people want in news depends on who you ask. Some people want mostly stories about the war in Iraq. Some want mostly news about science and health. Some want mostly celebrity and showbiz news.

The problem with newspapers is that it's simply not possible to carry everything that's syndicated. Costwise, it just can't be done. So the paper has to appeal to the mass audience and ignore most of the niche features that are often more interesting to read in detail than their ideas of the top stories of the day.

As a result, as people discover their idea of top stories to read on the Internet, they're discovering that they're just not getting what they want out of their local papers, so as a result, the newspapers' circulation is declining. Advertising is flat or declining. With the cost of materials going up, the cost to produce the papers goes up, so the price of each issue goes up. San Diego raised its paper to 75 cents an issue, with each issue giving out about 50 percent of the news and features it once had ten years ago when it once cost 50 cents an issue.

As circulation declines, specialized zoned editions continue to fade away. There is no longer a San Diego edition of the Los Angeles Times since the early 1990s. Many of the newspapers have simply jettisoned the specialized zoned editions to save money. Some have gotten rid of the Sunday TV magazine to save more money.

Some competeting papers combined into one company. Back in the 1990s, two North County newspapers, the Oceanside Blade-Citizen, and the Escondido Times-Advocate, which each produced daily and Sunday editions, combined into the North County Times.

Two San Diego metro papers that actually were produced from the Copley company, The San Diego Union in the morning and the Evening Tribune in the afternoon, combined into the present-day San Diego Union-Tribune. The Union had the Sunday edition; the Tribune didn't.

Many of the stories are covered USA Today style, with just a short paragraph summarizing the headlines, instead of going deep into detail, and for that, you have to look up the stories on the Internet.

Some newspapers have quit reporting on the daily stock market altogether. You can find updated stock quotes on the Internet where it's always updated.

Though advertisements in newspapers are still a preferred source of comparative prices for comsumers, the companies that are advertising continues to decline, resulting in the higher cost of each issue. For the first time ever, I didn't see Fry's Electronics' four-page Friday insert.

The Internet continues to refine itself on how to place advertisements in their news sites so that people will scan and see an advertisement, sometimes betweeen paragraphs within the stories, and that's what the advertisers want to see. They don't want their ads placed on one column and out of the way of the readers' eyes, who are fixed to scan down the other column, and missing all of the ads altogether.

Otherwise, online advertising is a great way to reach the audience and draw in some readers towards their websites for more information about their products.

Another factor against the newspapers: classifieds. You can see them in Monster, Hot Jobs, Craig's List, The San Diego Reader Classifieds, and other places for free placement of classifieds. Some papers responded by giving away free short classifieds, but in the end, it may have hurt the Union-Tribune in revenues so much that it had to raise their prices.

Newspapers are often aimed at older people where the appeal to have portable top stories to read are mostly aimed at. I haven't seen any young people pick up the newspaper in most of the past ten years. They're either oblivious to the news or they are simply not interested in reading about issues that they have no interest in. For the younger readers, there's the Internet.

Free weekly news such as the Reader and City Beat in San Diego appeal to mostly the younger readers, for those, they're not likely to be readers of the big newspapers.

The figures of the U.S. daily newspaper circulation contines to shrink, from about 62 million for the total weekday in 1990 to 53 million in 2005. The weekday evening circulation shrunk from about 21 million to 7 million, but many evening papers folded up and were absorbed into their sister morning publications where available.

The average circulation of the daily newspapers, for the weekday edition, shrunk from 72,500 in 1990 to 60.000 in 2005.

Because of the Internet, and the high cost of the dailies, seven-day-a-week subscribers are becoming a smaller group, especially if the price of the daily hits 75 cents an issue. Many are switching to getting the paper a few days of the week and skipping most of the other days. Some get just the Sunday paper, others pick up the paper on the day they usually have a weekly feature like food or religion.

Another factor to blame: the federal do-not-call registry restricted telephone marketing and made using that method to gain new newspaper subscriptions harder to obtain, though they're more likely to call a person who might be interested in telemarketing offers than they were in the days before the do-not-call registry was in place.

The newspapers are responding to this by referring their readers to read more of their stories on their websites to build an online audience. Costwise, its cheaper to put the entire Karla Peterson TV Tracker columns online than it is to even print a few paragraphs of it in the newspaper.

Could all newspapers eventually become a web-only business? ComputorEdge, a weekly local computer news magazine since 1983, discontinued its print version at the end of 2007 and became online only at the start of 2008. This was due to the rising cost of transporting their weekly issues all over the county. As the cost of gasoline and diesel fuel goes up, so do the costs of transporting the papers to the stores. Without the print editions, however, their own source of advertising, their own business, goes away. There are new people in San Diego since the beginning of 2008 who have never heard of ComputorEdge or knew that it was once a print magazine.

In 2006, just 35% of people between 18 and 24 read a newspaper in an average week, according to data from the Scarborough Research. That is down from 42% in 1999. In contrast, 67% of adults over the age of 65 read a newspaper in an average week in 2006. This from the Scarborough Research Center, survey data spring 2006.

Ibid reports that Education has always been a strong indicator of newspaper readership, and that continues to be the case. In 2006, 64% of those with postgraduate degrees said they read a newspaper in an average week. In contrast, 47% of high-school-only graduates read the paper.

Some people are beginning to realize that they can read the daily news online with a portable computer and a wireless connection, so the need for them to pick up a physical paper is useless for them.

So what's going to happen to nespapers in the future? Go online only? Boost circulation by eliminating the price and be entirely funded by advertisers? Whatever direction the papers go, they still won't be able to compete with the wide universe of the news found on the Internet.

Now let's see where I can find the top ten dementia songs of the week. Sorry, it's not in the paper. It's on the Internet.

Read more on this issue:

Reinventing Newspapers: The Future of News in Santa Barbara

The State of the News Media