Will online media’s triumph over the print turn out to be a pyrrhic victory in the long run?
By Zafar Anjum
10 Dec 2008
Recession grips American media, screamed a headline. Then followed a litany of details, on failing or financially challenged publications in the US.
According to the report, the publisher of The Los Angeles Times and The Chicago Tribune has filed for bankruptcy. One of the world’s most popular (print as well as online) newspapers, The New York Times, is seeking a US$225 million loan against it’s headquarters in Manhattan. The Miami Herald is already on sale. From a daily, The Christian Science Monitor has become a weekly. And so on.
Of course, I read the story online. And right there, you can see the reason that’s creating this media recession.
There is nothing particularly new about this phenomenon of declining profits, which is now almost global in nature. For years, as more and more people are choosing to access news and views online, we have been hearing about the impending death of the print media. Every few months, the news of a media company’s woes surfaces and the debate (print vs. online media) gets rekindled.
So what is really going on?
Will online become a complimentary medium, just as radio first threatened and then emerged as complimentary to print media? Will internet and other media come to co-exist?
The answer is probably no. Everything will become Internet.
I will tell you why.
Unlike the past technologies, there is a fundamental difference between the internet and the other media (like newspapers, magazines, radio or TV). It is not just one thing—it is everything in one: your newspaper, radio and TV all rolled into one. It is on-demand and consumer-controlled. And the good thing is that you don’t need a Tivo to cut out the commercials. You can read, watch or hear pretty much whatever you want, on a screen big (desktop/notebook) or small (mobile devices), in a stationary or mobile state. And there are two more good things going for it. You can shout back (become your own author or make yourself heard) and it’s mostly free.
It is the last factor—content being offered free of charge—that is creating problems for the traditional media. However, it is not the reader or the platform itself that is a handicap for the media companies. It is the advertisers and their media planners who are failing to go with the flow.
And that’s the real problem.
While the readers have, for obvious reasons, increasingly moved to the online platform, the advertisers want to stick to the coattails of an age-old set up. If not so, then why would they value a print reader many times over an online reader?
This ongoing discrimination is crucial to understand, as it is still tipping the scale in favour of a dying medium.
The advertisers apply a different set of rules for the online medium. Even their expectations (in terms of ROI) are different. That’s why the media companies, despite winning favour with the online readers, are struggling to keep their printing machines running. This trend is proving deadly this year as online ads are slowing down: IDG reported that US online advertising (including for companies such as Google, Yahoo, Facebook and MySpace) has seen its growth lose significant speed in the first half of this year. Compared with the first half of 2007, online ad spending grew 15.2 per cent to US$11.5 billion in the U.S. The news is bad for the third quarter too: 11 per cent growth compared to 25 per cent in 2007.
Readers are shifting from print to online but the advertisers are still playing by the old rules. This is harming the entire industry. That’s why many publishers are going out of business.
Many media experts believe that this would lead to the consolidation of print. The weaker titles might even die. In a free market that is the natural thing to happen. Don’t expect governments to bail them out as they did with the Wall Street or they are doing with the auto industry. We will keep hearing the same bad news: bankruptcies, buy outs, lay offs and outsourcing.
But the triumph of the online media over print might turn out to be a pyrrhic victory. The world will be less democratic with the death of the print media institutions, the fourth estate of democracy. This is very important because the major media institutions set the agenda for public debate and carry out investigations with their army of reporters and journalists that is beyond the means of a humble blogger or online news network.
This too might change in the future but that’s something hard to predict.
Zafar Anjum is the online editor of MIS Asia portal.
