Content Marketing Today

The Sad New News Media Mantra: "All the News That Fits We Print"

As surely as traditional news content contracts, reduced readership will follow. Simultaneously, Internet news usage has skyrocketed 600% in 10 years.

Nobody would have thought that a decades old Mad Magazine parody of the old New York Times slogan, “All the news that’s fit to print”  would become reality across the print news provider universe.  In fact, too often, not much fits in print anymore.

Sadly, we are now witnessing a downward spiral in which less print content drives lower readership which shrinks ad pages which results in less print content… and on and on and on until the end.

In our local Southwest Florida market, it has just been announced that one of our local newspapers will be printing smaller issues and combining sections–so that a stand-alone business section is effectively dead.  In the hard-hit Detroit market, only three issues of one local newspaper and two issues of another will be delivered to subscribers. The venerable Newsweek has announced that it will be shrinking as it tries to reinvent a new–and presumably–non-news persona.  Exactly the same kind of anorexic behavioral trend is pervasive in trade publishing as well.

Unfortunately, this kind of information shrinkage is likely to take newspapers and magazines from life support to flatline rather than to ultimate survival.

A core publishing concept is that to succeed every magazine or newspaper must have a critical mass of content that is relevant and compelling to its readers. There must be enough content so that targeted readers will devote time to reading those publications that are chock full of must read information.

New Gallup survey confirms news source shift that may doom traditional news sources–both print and broadcast

The overall trend tracked for more than decade by the Gallup organization points to significantly less consumption of traditional news sources by all Americans. That is scary enough.  But, when you look at the habits of younger readers and viewers, the trend becomes terrifying for the once mighty providers of both print and broadcast news.

Here’s a sampling of negative news gathering trends:

• a 40% drop in every issue readership by the weekly news magazines
• only 8% get weekly news from the news magazines
• a 25% drop in daily readership of local newspapers
• 47% never or only occasionally read local newspapers
• 51% never or occasionally watch nightly network news programs
• 84% never or occasionally read national newspapers
• 74% never or occasionally watch Sunday morning TV news programs

Drilling down to a younger demographic, the seismic shift in information gathering looks bad for most information outlets other than the Internet and the possible exception of local TV news.  The latter is still strong but declining.

Here is how 18 to 29-year-olds gather daily news:

• 36% use the Internet (up from 26 % in 2007)
• 36% watch local TV news (down from 44% in 2007)
• 22% read local newspapers
• 12% read national newspapers
• 18% watch nightly network news
• 24% watch cable news networks

The Bottom-line:

We still devour news, but we are less and less likely to seek it where there is less and less content.  Next generation news seekers have already made a shift away from their parents’ and grandparents’ news sources. That’s very bad news for traditional news purveyors.  And, it means that, in the months and years to come, you will need to deliver your content directly to your customers and prospects without those once trusted intermediaries.

Here’s a link to the Gallup article: Cable, Internet News Sources Growing in Popularity