Evolving Print

John Dowd has summed up one of the key elements of this question of personalization of print in pointing out that the problem with newspapers (dwindling circulation) has nothing to do with platform and everything to do with giving people choice (of content).

Visit http://www.evolvingprint.com to see graphics that go with this text.

The full blogs:

Before leaving the Why Print theme I want to toss out a couple of additional data points that suggest that the widely held wisdom that Print Is Dead is off the mark.

Consider The Economist, my favorite magazine. Though serving higher-income readers with above-average penetration rates of both smart phones (judging by how frequently the iPhone is advertised on the back cover) and broadband internet the magazine has managed to double its print circulation over the last six years. Here’s the chart:

That’s quite remarkable, isn’t it? Across a recession and in spite of the introduction of Facebook, iPhones, YouTube, etc here is a print publication that can’t stop growing!

Oh, and lest you conclude that The Economist has been boosting sales by catering to gray hairs among us, consider that the average age of its readers is 39 years old – younger than that of any other major news magazine (source).

One more interesting data point is worth mentioning. The Radio and Television News Director’s Foundation took the simple approach and just asked people whether they prefer to read in print or online (full report here). Intentionally or not they very usefully (for my purposes) asked the question in a manner that isolates the impact of the media – print vs. online – without clouding the issue by considering the differing content each offers. Here’s what they found:

Notably, the answer from the 18-34 year old cohort was remarkably similar to that of older respondents: 76.5% of the former group preferred print to 77.5% of the latter.

This data suggests that the culprit behind the unambiguous shift from print newspaper reading to online reading (of principally non-newspaper sites) is not the paper on which the newspaper is printed but rather the content which it includes.

The idea that content is king (or culprit) explains why some print (The Economist and college newspapers) continue to thrive while others, despite the reader’s preference for print, do not.

But more on that in a later post.

Why print?
Posted on August 11, 2010 by John Dowd
A blog on print? Really? Wasn’t there a memo…something about online killing print?

Yup, heard all that before. But the truth is print retains a lot vitality, despite the rumors of its impending demise. I hope to share some of that story in this blog, along with my own thoughts on how print ought to evolve so that the rumors remain just that.

Entry #1 on the “why print” ledger comes from what should be ground zero for the death of print – the college campus. ”Ground zero” because college campuses have all the ingredients that are allegedly connected to print’s death at the hands of the internet:

Young people
Free WiFI
Ubiquitous laptops and smart phones
So, what do you get when you mix those nasty ingredients and stir? Well, Alloy Marketing+Media did some research on 550 campuses to find out – their results may surprise you.

That’s right, the printed edition gets more traction in a single day than the online edition gets in a month! (30% read print daily, 20% read online monthly)

Both are free and have identical content. The online edition is probably more available given that students have their laptops and smartphones with them at all times.

Hmmm…so much for the perfect storm, right?

Now don’t get me wrong. Newspapers have a huge problem. In fact, they have two. The first is declining ad sales. Left unresolved this will lead to dramatically lower profits (and under-staffed newsrooms and other follow on effects). The second and larger problem is declining circulation, especially among younger readers. Left unresolved this will lead not to lower profits but rather to oblivion for the industry.

My concern is that the industry is misdiagnosing the first problem and largely ignoring the second (or at least not treating it as the burning platform that it really is).

The problem, however, is not print, as the campus newspaper illustrates. In fact, in a future post I’ll elaborate how – in the parlance of web developers – print is actually a feature, not a bug, of the current model.