Problems facing print media

Print media is going to be a thing of the past, like it or hate it, thats the truthful fact which has been scaring many news paper companies over the years and the sad thing is, not a lot can be done about it. With new technology, lifestyle and easier ways of getting access to news, the victim ends up begin print media. 
What is killing print media?
What can be done to save media?
Whats the new way of accessing news?

The publisher of the New York Times acknowledged Wednesday that the newspaper will go
 out of print — eventually.
"We will stop printing the New York Times sometime in the future, date TBD," Arthur Sulzberger.
 Sulzberger's statement came in response to a prediction that the newspaper would go out-of-print
 by 2015.

The image below shows how paper circulation in estate paper has risen and declines over the years. This is similar to most print media news papers. 

No more then 20 years ago people were in full demand of print media. People would pay for it, wait days, weeks, months for papers, magazines etc, but that is a thing of the past now. People do not need to wait to get what they want and in many cases do not need to pay for it. Print media is not loosing out to quality, its loosing out to accessibility and they are in desperate need to change it quickly.
Over the past year print media is down 30% and the many reasons why print media is dying is because of the way we lead our lives. 

1.changing lifestyle -  People are working longer hours and the demands of todays lifestyles are causing people to get what they need quickly, whether it be food to the news. People will look up anything they need and will get what they want without having to leave their computer. Our main source of information in past decades was print media, radio and t.v, now most tv networks have their own web sites for news which are updates minute by minute causing news to travel faster.
2. Better Advertising elsewhere - With the print media in total decline and fewer people picking up a news paper, this is causing many advertising companies to look else where to take their products or jobs etc to be broadcast. This as a result is casing news paper companies to loose money and as a back lash have to increase their prices for advertisement, which is doing nothing good but only making less companies use print media. ( The example I used for this is at the last article at the bottom of the blog)

3. Technology - People do not need to leave their house or office to find out instant news. With todays technology such as the computer, iPad, Facebook, twitter, phones etc. People can easily find out what ever they want and with little trouble. Many thing people do iowa days such as communicate, apply for work etc is made much easier allowing people to broaden their communication.
Another problem facing print media and journalist is that with all this new technology which anyone can access, it is allowing anybody to write up news and not be a professional writer for a company. Millions of random every day people can post their own news and pictures on such web sites as twitter which is then viewed by millions. 




Just to give you an example of how things have changed, i found this article going an example of how the amount of money payed to a journalist back in the 1950's to today and what has changed with it.

In the 1950s, professional magazine writers could earn US$1 a word for their work—and a decent house could be bought for $5000.

In the 1990s, writers were still looking at $1 a word as the standard, but the same house cost $350,000—70 times as much!

In the 1950s print media—newspapers, magazines and books—ruled supreme, challenged only by radio as a communications medium.

Then came television, increased literacy, decreased publication costs, and a flood of new magazines.

Independent magazines were bought up by publishing conglomerates, and the tenor of the editorial office took on a more hard-nosed business-like note.

(http://www.writerswebsiteplanner.com/print/)

IDG, a leading technology media, events and research company. Now as chairman and still active participant, Pat owns 85% of this 46-year-old media powerhouse, which is currently generating $3 billion in revenue annually. He explains in this video, how he has managed to maintain his media company going and print while a lot of other companies have fallen.


I feel that it is only a matter of time before News papers are the things of the past. People do not want to go out and buy a newspaper that they can read on the computer/mobile phone etc in their own home with out going outside or out of their way to get one. Today news stories online are free and that is another reason people prefer to use technology to keep them selves up dated with news. Why pay for something you can get for free. I do not know what could be done to keep the news companies going, they will need to have a big think into their future otherwise they will lose out.




This clip below is a section I found about the problems facing print media and their advertising section. To summarize this section, It was saying that over the years advertising companies have been taking their money and their adverts elsewhere to other new sources and technology, but as the news companies are loosing advertisement income, instead of reducing the cost to gain more income, they have in fact increased their prices. which i think is a wrong move as they will only lose more money for them selves.

Explination into the 10% problem

Most newspaper executive use words like “eventually” to push off into a fuzzy future a transition that they know needs to happen sooner rather than later, but still find impossible to conceptualize because of the 10% problem.
What is the 10% problem? Let’s look at the New York Time’s numbers. According to the NYT online media kit, here are the print and online audience numbers:

• Online unique users (12 month average): 13,372,000
• Print circulation – weekday: 1,120,420
• Print circulation – Sunday: 1,627,062

NYT doesn’t report ad revenue for NYTimes.com broken out from its News Media Group (which includes mostly other local newspapers, but is likely dominated by NYT revenue)

• Total advertising revenue: $483,594,000
• Online advertising revenue: $51,000,000

Let’s assume that the NYTimes.com has roughly the same portion of ad revenue coming from online. What you find, with some modest rounding, is that print circulation is about 10% of total audience reach, while online advertising revenue is 10% of total ad revenue — the economics are nearly the perfect inverse of what they should be.
But why is this so? Let’s take a look at NYT print and online ad rates, using employment as an example. Here are the print display ad rates for employment:

And here is the rate for an online employment display ad in the job market section of NYTimes.com:

It’s hard to compare apples and oranges — a big pat of the problem — but the online ad looks like about a quarter of the screen:

So let’s say I wanted to buy a quarter page ad in the Sunday edition for each of four weekends across a month. A half page is 63 column inches, so four quarter pages would be 126 column inches for the four ads. At a half page rate of $1,247 per column inch, that’s $157,122 for the four quarter page display ads in print.
Those ads would run in the Money, Business, or Week in Review sections, so would reach people who didn’t necessarily look in the employment section. It’s difficult to compare it then to the $7,500, which gets you a 20% share of voice display ad in the online job market section. But given that the NYTimes.com has nearly 10 times the reach of the Sunday print edition, $157,122 vs. $7,500 is a pretty eye-popping disparity.
Let’s try another print/online comparison. NYTimes.com also has a package called Employer of the Day, which gets you an ad on the homepage of NYTimes.com:

The homepage of nytimes.com is viewed by more than 1 million unique visitors every day. For Job Market advertisers seeking quick access to an extremely large audience, the Employer of the Day position can deliver a branded message twice per week.
Attract passive jobseekers
This position exists on the homepage of nytimes.com in order to attract jobseekers who may not be visiting nytimes.com specifically to visit Job Market. This provides you with an outstanding opportunity to woo potential jobseekers, who may be on the site to read articles, view award-winning multimedia content or use any one of our other services. By becoming the Employer of the Day, all visitors to nytimes.com become potential jobseekers for you to target.

Here’s the pricing:

So for $10,000, you get a 20% share of voice on the homepage for a full month. For the same $10,000, you can also reach about 1 million people in the daily print edition, for ONE day, with a 10 column inch ad (based on open rate of $1,056 per column inch), which is about 1/12 of a page.
With such a disparity in how the New York Times values its print advertising and how it values its online advertising, is it any wonder that it suffers from the 10% problem?


Read more: http://publishing2.com/2007/07/17/newspaper-online-vs-print-ad-revenue-the-10-problem/#ixzz27LhzOsoQ






www.nytimes.com
eprints.lse.ac.uk/21177/1/Young_people_new_media_(LSERO).pdf
www.ehow.com › Culture & Society
mkt-iq.com/.../1.../123-media-evolution-the-changing-role-of-print