Once again a presidential election seems to have been a boost for the Internet, but it’s not clear from this report how much of that Internet coverage that attracts people is actually newspapers and other traditional media moved to the web:
The internet, which emerged this year as a leading source for campaign news, has now surpassed all other media except television as a main source for national and international news.
Currently, 40% say they get most of their news about national and international issues from the internet, up from just 24% in September 2007. For the first time in a Pew survey, more people say they rely mostly on the internet for news than cite newspapers (35%). Television continues to be cited most frequently as a main source for national and international news, at 70%.
Interestingly, another study found that newspapers are rapidly adopting social media for their online versions:
Newspapers’ tough times appear to have spurred the industry to adopt the kind of social media habits that have led so many readers away from the traditional news format. In The Bivings Group’s annual look at how newspapers use the internet, the researcher found that 58 percent of dailies offered some form of user-generated content this past year. That’s more than double the 24 percent of papers that had user-gen features in 2007. Other finding’s from Bivings’ report (PDF):
—The number of papers who opened up stories to user comments also more than doubled in the last year to 75 percent in 2007 versus just 33 percent the year before.
But the researchers were far from convinced about the merits of these experiments with social media, which are much more of the dipping toe variety rather than a full-bodied plunge:
Speaking generally, our study shows that newspapers are trying to improve their web programs and aggressively experimenting with a variety of new features. However, having actually reviewed all these newspaper websites it is hard not to be left with the impression that the sites are being improved incrementally on the margins. Newspapers are focused on improving what they already have, when reinvention may be what is necessary in order for the industry to come out of the current crisis on the other side.
On the other hand, surviving solely on web income still seems to be a distant dream for traditional newspapers:
For big operations like The New York Times, surviving as a web-only news product would require about 1.3 billion page views a month. That’s significantly more than the 173 million NYTimes.com saw in October (per comScore), MediaBuyerPlanner noted.
Nevertheless, the LA Times now says its web revenue is enough to fully cover editorial costs:
Russ Stanton, editor of the LA Times, sent email following up on questions I had confirming the much-discussed report below that its web revenue is now sufficient to meet its entire editorial payroll. “Given where we were five years ago,” he email, “I don’t think anyone thought that would ever happen. But that day is here.”
While newspapers struggle to find a new, sustainable business model, the future of books seems far more assured:
But print is not dying — it’s changing. It’s happened before. Consider the history of the book. Books were once luxury products for an elite class. In Asia, where printing with movable metal type was perfected, print was not used as a mass media – instead, it was a technique of standardization. Massive social change associated with the European Renaissance is what caused print to take off as a form of mass media. Now that phase of print may be drawing to a close.
But the book remains a perfected technology. Gutenberg’s work is still perfectly usable. Try that with software from even twenty years ago. The book is portable, it supports multimedia (words and pictures), it is platform independent, and you can move around in a printed book effortlessly, often finding what you are looking for even faster than you can with electronic search. You can, if you choose to, annotate the text easily.
Meanwhile, some newspapers, as Mark Fletcher reports, still find it hard to meet demand on occasion:
We sold out of the Australian Financial Review bumper edition yesterday. Frustrating. That they have only one issue to cover a week is also frustration – I say that as a Fin reader.
