Another report says Australian newspapers in massive decline

Hugh Martin reports "The Australian Press Council has just released The State of the News Print Media in Australia Report 2006...... I can't help but think there's a lot of wishful thinking going on in this report. The authors are by and large working editors, with a couple of academics thrown in for good measure."

I haven't read the report yet but this graph above (click on it to bring up the full size version) pretty much tells the true story. Look at the graph on the right. Look at the decline in circulation since 1999. Now grab a ruler and extend that line downwards. If you are so inclined, make the decline exponential.

Face it, my friends in the newspaper business. Things are changing faster than many of you care to admit. I know Hugh isn't one of those. Neither is Mark Jones at the AFR. Don't forget to buy a copy today to read about Telstra v Tom Reynolds.

Comments

[Rob Irwin]

I know you love these reports, Cam, and probably do some kind of mad jig around the loungeroom every time you see one prior to sitting down and posting, but a more balanced comment would also talk about the massive upswing these same organisations are seeing in online revenue, too. It's swings and roundabouts, my friend, swings and roundabouts.

[Miriam Parkinson]

Mad jigs around the lounge room are to be encouraged. They're good for your health.

I think the main point is that whilst old media may be making online revenue the decline of newspapers in the traditional sense means that firstly, we don't have to actually buy the newspaper anymore and secondly that blogs and other purely online news sources are getting to be on pretty much the same level. In a couple of generations there will be little to no distinction.
I can pretty much guaranty to you that if people had to buy the online form of the newspaper to read it then readership would plummet. Its primary advantage as far as I'm concerned is that its free and it tells me what the current and predicted weather is.

Its a well known fact that most of the technology and opinion content comes from journalists reading blogs and forums and going "they're talking about xyz alot... lets steal their opinions on it and then publish them" even the ruddy vogue.com.au forums have been quoted (without permission mind you) in opinion columns.

And besides, you would cling on to the last vestiges of old media... You're a journalist.

[Rob Irwin]

Its a well known fact that most of the technology and opinion content comes from journalists reading blogs and forums and going "they're talking about xyz alot... lets steal their opinions on it and then publish them"

OMG, you're kidding, right? While I could never deny that some IT stories have been broken in blogs, I think you're seeing examples of this and deciding they're the rule when they're really not.

I mean, have you stopped to consider the volume of material that's churned from the average IT newsroom? Seriously, come and sit next to me for a week and see how news is actually gathered and written. You might be surprised at how little, if at all, the blogosphere plays into it. To not put too fine a point on it, the blogosphere quotes the mainstream media far more than the mainstream media quotes the blogosphere. I'm really comfortable saying that.

You'll also note that a lot of these blogs that have broken news stories don't actually do it everyday. Some will break one genuine story then eat out on it for months and months before they do it again, if ever. News organisations break real news every single day. The gulf between the two is vast, but you'd probably only really get it if you could see both sides of the fence, I guess.

Jonesy? Simon? Gus? Any of the tech hacks who read this blog want to chime in with how many stories you supposedly crib from blogs instead of sourcing and breaking yourself?

[Cameron Reilly]

Rob, the post and the report are about "news PRINT media". PRINT, dude, PRINT. I don't care, right now, what other money making schemes the organisations have, be it online, casinos or running guns to insurgents. We're ALL seeing an upswing in online revenue. But the bread and butter for these organization is the print business and it is in serious decline. The main reason I write these posts though is that nearly everytime I talk to someone from the newspaper business they DENY that newspapers are in decline! It's dodo syndrome. Someone has to point out the facts. The facts that the newspapers themselves don't report it accurately is another story...

[Rob Irwin]

Yes, and with regard to that, we are on the same page. The stats are there. They don't lie.

But I also strongly believe that online and alternate revenue streams are an important flipside to the same coin. Otherwise you are only succeeding in presenting an extremely skewed viewpoint.

Folk who read a post like this, and whom don't critically think about the other revenue streams now being employed at those organisations, etc, are going to come to a majorly skewed view about the health of the organisation in general.

Think of News Corp owning MySpace, as just one example. Does the decline in newsprint really worry the parent organisation when it has new ways to print money, like that?

[Miriam Parkinson]

I'm more talking about the large number of "so and so is big on youtube" and other fluff articles that seem to appear so often recently, and I have seen a lot of articles that have both quoted and misquoted forum posts without permission and rather upset the writers of said posts.

I'm not denying that the articles are researched its just that I can't remember the last time I heard anything new from the technology section of a newspaper. This does sort of imply that bloggers are doing as good a job of sourcing technology material as the journalists.

I apologise for the gross generalization I made in my previous comment I was in a bad mood from a combination of an 8.30am lecture with a lecturer who thinks everything is "extremely very interesting" and not even nearly enough caffeine :-)

What I should have said is a lot of material rather than most.

But then, I don't have the privilege of an editor and years of training in how not to get sued :-p

[Nick Miller]

That's a broad statement, ''nearly everytime I talk to someone from the newspaper business they DENY that newspapers are in decline! It's dodo syndrome.''

Sure they do. And the dodos were saying the same thing, were they? Interesting. Didn't know that.

I suspect you're exaggerating for effect. Newspaper journalists aren't as dumb as you'd like to think we are. We can read graphs. We also have a sophisticated level of insight into our own industry and audience. And, so far, newspapers aren't as dead as you'd like to think we are.

You're extrapolating a curve, and any mathematician will warn you about doing that. If by dodo you meant ostrich, maybe YOU'RE the one with your head in the sand. Who's to say?

What I'm saying is we share the same information, and we're just as aware of it as you are. You don't have a special tunnel to the future (as far as I know) - or, for that matter, Mauritius in 1662, where I know for a fact the dodos were too busy podcasting to avoid the heavy axe of progress.

cheers

Nick

[Miriam Parkinson]

Ack the journalists are fighting back with their high verbal IQs and degrees in written communication.

As far as I'm concerned no one is accusing newspaper journalists of being stupid and there will definitely be a market for newspapers in the traditional sense for a while yet. The long argument I had a with a woman who couldn't be convinced that in the case of ebooks (particularly of out of print works) the value of the literature is greater than the value of the paper it is written on proves that there are at least some people who wont read anything if they can't "feel the pages".

The important thing is that this demand is decreasing and old media companies need a more dramatic shift in their business model than simply duplicating the content onto an online format, and if they don't succeed in doing so, they might get left behind.

[Nick Miller]

Trying to damn me with faint praise, Miriam? If you scorn verbal IQ and communication skills then maybe the online news sphere IS for you!

The 'newspapers are the living dead' argument tends to quiet down a bit when you ask 'alright, what's the alternative then?'.

Is it citizen journalism? Don't make me laugh (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBrK8fB6uYk).

Is it blogs? The vast majority of the blogswamp is clogged with self-referential wank. The best blogs are online opinion columns with a specialised focus and an often timewasting interactive letters page. Maybe once every few months they genuinely break a news yarn. Nice, but hardly a potentially dominant news life form.

What's left? The major news organisations, who are duplicating their news model online (with varying degrees of tweak). Don't dismiss that model out of hand. Its dominant shaping force has always been, not the fact it's printed on a dead tree, but clinical analysis of WHAT PEOPLE WANT TO READ. Those truths don't suddenly change just because the words are on a screen.

It's now up to the readers, not the tech elite, to decide whether they want to read online or on a piece of paper. And there are many pieces of the technological puzzle not yet in place for the former to be decisively more compelling than the latter.

One more point: about journos stealing ideas from blogs. Sure, it's bad journalism. And there's no bad journalism online, eh?

n

[Miriam Parkinson]

I couldn't possibly scorn verbal IQ. Its where I hide most of mine. I also enjoy debating both sides of an argument just for the fun of it.

I have no problem with newspapers, but newspapers seem to have a very big problem with bloggers. In fact The Age seems to have an entire section now on why citizen media sucks.

So why all this blog bashing? You don't need to be a trained journalist to write interesting content and if the letters pages are so time wasting then what are you doing participating. Why not go back to sifting through the vast quantities of newsworthy material that comes stampeding through your offices on a daily basis and deciding what people want to read on their behalf so that they don't have to bother with figuring that out for themselves.

[Bob M]

I think that the strategies of News Ltd. and John Fairfax Holdings Ltd. generally indicates they see their future growth in non-print media, although they are not giving up on print anytime soon; and their acquisition of additional mastheads indicates a belief they can grow both. A careful reading of their annual reports supports this view.

So, Cam's thesis is generally correct.

[Urbaer]

Hmmm... can't see that old media is going to expect you to pay for reading online (apart from archives which I'm grumbly about). I mean really when you go down to the newsagency and pick up a copy of the paper, what's that $1 paying for really? How much of a newspaper is funded by advertising (and can online versions survive purely on advertising).

I think what's interesting is what will happen down the road. I don't think it's a question of will newspapers be able to make the transition to online forms, they have, and sure people are reading them. But doesn't this give a level playing field? Doesn't this mean that a group of people with an AAP feed, a bit of nounce and some talent could rival the big players?

[Miriam Parkinson]

That's a good point Urbaer, and the advantage of the online realms is that you can create your own connections. Anyone can become prominent online with some talent and a little work in getting yourself heard over the other screaming idiots.

[Tony]

There will continue to be a decline in "PRINT" or physical media as we bring up a new generation who are around technology most of their lives. Being online now for most teenagers is where it is at, not sitting around reading newspapers and magazines and also why Myspace is so popular despite it's numerous flaws.

i do buy the paper everyday, for my parents, but I rarely read it except for liftouts 2-3 times a week as i get all the news I am interested in online either during a lunch break or when i get home from my RSS aggregrator. I think this is a similar occurance in most younger generation families and professionals.

Regarding the blogosphere and the media i think they do steal from each other. There is nothing that comes out in a gaming magazine let us say that may interest me that I haven't already heard about or read online weeks or months ago. A lot of blogs have advantages at big events, expos and announcements as such that they can do real-time reporting (Endgadget for example) where they update you about events or speeches as they happen. AFAIK print media don't have that ability or option and it can hurt what they have to say in the future as it is already known.

A lot of bloggers also borrow stories from journalists which you only have too look at memeorandum where most of the lead stories are from NY Times or other big paper and then blogosphere has 300 posts by different people aboout the story and it's follow ups.

With online news though do people go directly to their paper of choice or do they go to an aggregreated news source like Google news or similar?

[Martin Wells]

Something that doesn't quite add up for me on the graph. The decline in newspapers began well before the rise of the internet. It seems to be accelerating lately, but the question should still be asked. If the internet wasn't the catalyst of the decline, what was? And is it still in effect?

[Rob Irwin]

A lot of blogs have advantages at big events, expos and announcements as such that they can do real-time reporting...

I guess if you use Cam's view of what print media is (ie: print media is literally words printed on paper), that makes sense. But that's not the only way of looking at the print media. When I think of "print media", for example, I immediately think of any related online properties which repurpose the print edition's copy, too. For example, I don't think the online arm of the Age is some kind of weird and different thing to the print edition. How can it be, when 99% of the content shared between the two properties is the same? I literally cannot think of any print publication without also thinking of its online arm simply being the "real time" version of the print edition and intrinsically linked to it. So while you can say that a daily newspaper or a monthly magazine "can't blog at an expo" because of the time restraints, yes, the physical paper copy can't - but I bet you it's online arm can... and will! So where's the real advantage of the blogger? To claim, "I had this story before the print edition of 'x' magazine," isn't being entirely truthful when 'x' magazine, for example, DID put the same story online the same day as the blogger. I think this is why there's some disconnect in the way people interpret each other in this debate. Different opinions on what the "print media" really entails.

[Urbaer]

Tony, Disagree with the gaming mag aspect. Certainly the only gaming mag I buy is Edge http://www.edge-online.co.uk/ which doesn't really deal with breaking news, instead it focuses on issues, industry navel gazing, thoughts of the future and retrospectives. I think monthly mags can survive by doing this stuff. I'd much rather read a 3000 word article in print rather than online. In fact the only other magazine I buy is The Monthly, which has a similar angle.

[Cameron Reilly]

Rob, re the MySpace example - News Corp earning money out of that shouldn't worry Rupert, but how many journalists and editors are currently on the MySpace payroll? Mark Jones got his story in the AFR today (Telstra Bloggers Told To Blog Off, great title btw) from me. Not sure if I'd say it was "cribbed", as he did his own leg work, talking to each of the participants. Did a lot more work than I did actually, although I'm not sure his story contained much new information except for Telstra taking down Tom's blog. I don't have a problem with Mark (or anyone) using a blog story as a lead. I *would* have liked Mark to credit me for breaking the story and putting in a pointer to my blog, and I told him this morning, but I was mostly pleased that he gave the story some exposure and gave me a plug in the process, so I'm fine with it. It's an interesting question though - if a MSM journo takes a story idea from a blog, should they give direct credit and a link?

[Rob Irwin]

Yeah, and how many stories has Jonesy written lately, or even broken, that weren't taken off blogs? Heaps! My point being that Mim was saying how we, as IT journos, apprantly rip most things off blogs, and now you're using this story as an example of a mainstream writer taking a lead from a blog... but really, it would be the exception, rather than the rule for many of us in this space. So let's be clear - I'm not saying it never happens, but it certainly doesn't happen as much as Mim might suggest, either! As for the lack of attribution and all that stuff; that's something that each writer will deal with in his/her own way, so I can't dip into commenting on that.

[Cameron Reilly]

Marty, I think the decline started when colour TV took off in this country (mid-70s?). VHS and DVD and XBOX etc have all played a part. The internet is just speeding things up. Basically, the more choice people have, the more competition the newspapers have. And we are about to enter an era of unprecedented choice.

[Cameron Reilly]

Nick, your comment cracked me up, thanks! Yeah the dodos talk to me via a psychic. And I'm not exaggerating. Go ask Mike Van Niekerk how many times he and I have argued in public forums over the last year about how well newspapers are doing. Ask Phil Sim how many fights I got into at his conference earlier this year. Although I will say that when Mark Jones and Hugh Martin and I were at the PANPA conference a few months ago, the mood was quite different. Though the President of PANPA did try to sound upbeat about how well newspapers were doing, the rest of the speakers at the event weren't so sure.

[Miriam Parkinson]

Rob firstly I was shit stirring, sorry. Most people eventually realise that anything controversial I say should never be taken seriously particularly when accompanied by statements about the health benefits of mad jigs and :-p faces.
Secondly I apologised for my gross generalization.

[David Hellaby]

It seems to me that much of this debate is about semantics. Newspapers are first and foremost commercial news organisations and I have not seen any of the majors going broke lately. Nor do I see any on the brink of bankruptcy. Business models change with the times and if news organisation have to give away daily newspapers - they will. It is afterall a business model that has been tried and proven with community newspapers and is used successfully in a number of countries. It is a matter of moving with the times.
Contrary to popular belief, colour television did not have a major impact on newspaper sales, nor did radio before it and the Internet has probably had less impact than you give it credit for.
Yes, week day newspaper sales have declined (they are not plummeting as you claim and if you read the graphs properly sale are in fact levelling out) but Sunday newspaper sales have risen sharply. The reason has little to do with the Internet, but changes in our lifestyle. Longer working hours, more pressure on our leisure time etc.
Business models change constantly and if you don't change with the times you go broke. News organisations have yet to find a way to replace journalists and they certainly cannot afford to rely on untrained and unqualified bloggers for their news.
While blogs may well be the initial source for some major news stories, the news organisations still have to do their own leg work.
In many cases reading blogs is similar to the times in the past when journos got some of their best stories in the pub. They are just another source.
Newspapers and magazine will be around for a long time to come and the best of them will continue to make a profit for a long time to come.
The PC was supposed to create a paperless society; television was supposed to kill the book publishing industry; DVD's were supposed to kill the cinema. It didn't happen.
We use triple the amount of paper we used to; book sales are booming and there are more cinema screens than ever before.
Don't fall into the same trap of believing that the Internet will kill newspapers.

[Cameron Reilly]

David, let me know quote Warren Buffett to you:

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The outlook for newspapers is not great. In the TV business, a license from the government was essentially the right to a royalty stream. There were basically three highways to people’s eyeballs, and companies like P&G, Ford, Gillette, and GM would pay a significant amount of money to be get on those highways and advertise their products to a mass audience. But as the ways to get in front of people’s eyeballs increases, the value of those highways goes down.

What multiple should you for a company that earns $100 million per year whose earnings are falling by 5% per year rather than rising by 5% per year? Newspapers face the prospect of seeing their earnings erode indefinitely. It’s unlikely that at most papers, circulation or ad pages will be larger in five years than they are now. That’s even true in cities that are growing.

But most owners don’t yet see this protracted decline for what it is. The multiples on newspaper stocks are unattractively high. They are not cheap enough to compensate for the companies’ earnings power. Sometimes there’s a perception lag between the actual erosion of a business and how that erosion is seen by investors. Certain newspaper executives are going out and investing on other newspapers. I don’t see it. It’s hard to make money buying a business that’s in permanent decline.

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[Cameron Reilly]

David says: "Sunday newspaper sales have risen sharply". Over what period? According to the report, in 2002 Metro Sunday sales were 3,516,338. In 2006 sales were 3,497,944. Where's the sharp rise David? Are you going back to 1990?