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If people call you crazy long enough, pretty soon you begin to question your sanity.
For the past 20 years or so, the demise of print newspapers has pretty much been a foregone conclusion of anyone who was involved in digital delivery of news.
As Kevin Slimp points out occasionally, it’s hardly surprising that the people trying to sell online advertising were promoting their product over their main competitors.
Oh, we were enveigled by the vast reach and democracy of the internet. Anyone can be a publisher! We’re going to enlist citizen journalists! The news will be crowd-sourced!
And we were ashamed we were not on the digital frontier. We moved too slow. We let the invading horde rob us of classifieds and real estate listings and employment ads.
Worse, we just didn’t get it. We were dinosaurs, even as the millennium turned over. We would soon be extinct.
I admit to being among the sharpest critics at times. Newspapers were folding. People were losing their jobs right and left. The circulation declines were staggering.
Looking back, of course, most of this occurred as the nation entered a severe recession. People didn’t need classifieds even when they were free. Real estate was in free-fall. Employment advertising? Ha!
Now, with another decade of hindsight, we can see a few things more clearly.
One is that digital advertising doesn’t work. People are willing to pay money to avoid it. Advertisers know it’s next to worthless because they refuse to pay more than a few pennies for it.
Now, though, along comes a researcher who says the whole argument over print vs. digital has been a lot of wasted breath.
H. Iris Chyi has written a book called “Trial and Error: U.S. Newspapers’ Digital Struggles” in which she points out, I think accurately, that too many of newspapers’ problems have been blamed on their inability to translate their print products into online revenue.
“To almost everyone’s surprise, the supposedly dying product (print) still outperforms the supposedly promising digital products by almost every standard — readership, engagement, paying intent, and advertising prospects.
A reality check is much needed.”
That quote from the interview linked above in MediaLife does nothing to let newspaper publishers off the hook. In fact, I see it as a wakeup call to quit twiddling their thumbs and get to work.
“The most important thing is, before they can convince anyone, newspaper managers must first convince themselves that their print product does not have to die.”
I have not yet read her book. I wouldn’t expect it to have any silver-bullet solutions for newspapers. It just sounds to me like a clear-eyed approach to a true re-evaluation of where resources are best spent.
Most disturbing for me is her revelation in the interview that a press association — I’m guessing a national one — was so engrossed in Digital First initiatives that it squelched her report. That’s damning — and revealing.
Maybe we, the defenders of print, have been crazy all these years. Or maybe we’ve just been misdiagnosed.