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The news about news is bad news – 1

Back at IIM Kozhikode, everyone had a subscription to a business newspaper (either the Economic Times, BusinessLine or Business Standard). You just had to have one, plopped every morning outside your door by the newspaper boy, where it would stay through the day, on top of yesterday’s copy, which lay on top of the day before’s, which lay on last week’s set, which…

The student populace at IIM Kozhikode was the most well informed and opinionated I’ve known, and yet no one read their morning business paper. The first lecture of the morning was spent behind laptop screens, on the Economic Times website and on moneycontrol.com. The true news junkies among them subscribed to email alerts from the same newspapers whose print editions lay in massive heaps outside their doors, unread.

Now imagine if nearly everyone you knew began consuming news this, way without bothering about print newspapers. And that’s what the newspaper industry in the United States is going through right now.

It’s worse in the US than at IIMK you know – fewer people are even buying newspapers, forget about them piling up outside American homes. Circulation fell over 7% in 2008. A click-happy population flocks to news websites instead, where the entire newspaper is typically available for free. If nothing else, the newspaper crisis has disproved the myth about Americans’ abysmal reading habits. The new myth is that Americans suddenly morph into voracious readers if you give them content for free.

Take the venerable New York Times. The newspaper that prints “all the news that’s fit to print” saw circulation drop 3.6% year-on-year but website traffic grow 6%. NYT’s web traffic is already at about 60% of its daily print circulation [1].

Americans have never had so many places to consume news – there are hundreds of newspaper websites and thousands of amateur and professional blogs, videos on YouTube and podcasts on iTunes – and they’re consuming with a vengeance. With typical glorious dysfunctional American excess, the computer is the first thing the population seems to turn to every morning. There are more people viewing more pages of news online with more ads than ever. So publishers and advertisers should be deliriously happy, right?

Well there’s just one small thing. They won’t click on the ads.

Next: Heck, why not?

[1] NYT’s daily print circulation on weekdays was 1,039,031 in March 2009, and its December 2008 web traffic was 18.2 million unique visitors, which is appx 587,100, or 60%.


August 30, 2009 ·  Post to Twitter ·  Email this ·  Uncategorized ·  Comments Off


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