Byline or Flatline: Are we Witnessing the Death of Newspapers?

I believe it was the American political satirist, Jon Stewart who jokingly mused on his popular show “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” about the imminent future of global print media. In a segment, entitled “Clusterf#@k to the Poor House“, Stewart asked his audience ” What’s black and white and completely over? Give up? It’s newspapers!”

Although it is true that traditional print media has successfully safeguarded itself against past competition, with the likes of radio and television expelled to the proverbial shade, experts and journalists alike believe that the Internet is proving a worthy adversary in the quest for custom.

According to the noted business website, Economist.com in a piece aptly labelled “Who Killed the Newspaper?“, it explains that the duty of traditional newspapers is to act as watchdog for governments and companies alike. In adition to this, newspapers play a vital role in setting the order of the day for other news media, such as television and radio. And yet, in the words of Economist.com, “newspapers are now an endangered species.”

In January of this year, the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) published circulation figures of Britain’s most popular print newspapers on the Guardian’s  website, guardian.co.uk. In addition to 2008’s figures, the previous year’s figures were published alongside in order to facilitate easy comparison.  Unfortunately, no British newspaper received a positive outcome at the end of the year. Several papers, like the Daily Star and the Daily Express escaped with minor losses. On the other hand the Independent took the largest hit, with a staggering 12.33% loss in circulation figures.

A recent survey conducted by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Europe in conjunction with PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) revealed that there was a startling 40% increase in the Online Advertising in Europe in 2007, amounting to an astromonical €11 billion, dramatically catching up on the US.

It was found that although two thirds of European advertisment budgets were spent in the three largest economies, the UK, Germany and France, small countries such as Greece and Slovenia also enjoyed  very high growth rates. President of IAB Europe, Alain Heureux, believes that European countries are steadily shifting towards their ‘10 before 10‘ policy. Simply put, the ‘10 before 10‘ policy states that by the year 2010, 10 European countries will spend 10% of their total advertisment budget on online advertising.

As a final thought, let me remind you what Time Magazine‘s Michael Kinsley argued in September 2006, “are we doomed to get our news from some acned 12-year-old in his parents’ basement recycling rumours from the Internet echo chamber?”

* This image was created by Samantha Vickers. The headstone outline came courtesy of Google Images. The information on the headstone is purely fictitious.