Bye, bye, print?
It’s becoming clearer and clearer to me that print operations in 2009 are simply a burden to most, if not all, newspapers. Printing is expensive, and axing the paper part of a news organization frees up a lot of money in the wake of declining advertising. But as the paper goes, so does the print advertising, and I can’t see how online advertising could even come close to funding editorial operations? Or can it?
Using the small newspaper I’m a part of as an example and the way things are now, any amount of advertising online (instead of in print) would yield us more money. At best, our print editions break even with advertising revenue and printing expenses, so we don’t make a cent. Sometimes we lose money. If we axed the print edition and got a sizable amount of online viewers (and we don’t pay anything for our website), any ad would give us a profit. This is, of course, assuming that print advertising won’t ever get better. And that’s a risky assumption to make.
So many things come into play as to why newspapers are losing out on advertising: the recession, the Internet, bad business decisions, the audience’s neglecting print… the list goes on. Pinpointing the cause(s) is crucial in deciding whether or not to say goodbye to print. If it’s bad business decisions, maybe the advertising department could step it up. If it’s the recession, things will get better. If it’s the Internet, a paper’s online presence should be enhanced while trimming the print circulation.
It goes without saying that the color ads newspapers get bring in a lot more money at once than multiple online ads will bring. And if people are eating up the editions, advertisers will feel more pressure to buy space. The same goes for online content. Get enough people to go to the site and to click on ads, and advertisers will pay more.
The ideal would be to have people gobble up the print edition and visit the website, too, to make the most money. But most of the time, that’s not the case. How can newspapers make both media enticing?
Really, the question newspapers today have to ask themselves is: What practical incentive do readers have to pick up the print edition? If they don’t know the answer, maybe it is time to let go.
