Warren Buffet once wrote: “If cable and satellite broadcasting, as well as the internet, had come along first, newspapers as we know them probably would never have existed". The rise in online media continues to have a dramatic effect on the newspaper industry. There is an almost tidal movement towards the instant, the interactive and the most accessible. It makes me wonder about Ireland’s first ever newspaper: An Account of the Chief Occurrences in Ireland, launched in 1659. What a fantastic name for a newspaper. Accessible? Maybe not. One can’t imagine an internet news start up considering a title such as this today. This paper was a periodical newsletter whose mission was to have a weekly distribution. Not bad for the mid seventeenth century. Fast forward three hundred and fifty three years to 2012. The appetite is now for immediate news. But this is not the sole reason for the decline in newspaper circulation. The cost of buying a paper is a factor. So too is the departure from the idea of the newspaper as the great authority in our lives and a move towards public participation in the news and vitally, reaction and contribution through social media. The question is, what do we lose in the decline of the printed paper and what is there to gain?
There is an interesting disparity in the readership statistics between the UK and Ireland. In the UK, all the papers with the highest circulations are tabloids, with The Sun leading the pack. Whereas in Ireland, the broadsheets are the bestselling papers, with the Irish Independent leading the way, while the Irish tabloids are all at the bottom of the list. What does this say about our two countries? Of course there are great differences in readership across the globe. Japan, a country with less than half the total population of the Unites States has a circulation of 14 million for its top newspaper, Yomiuri Shimbun. In the US, the top paper is The Wall Street Journal with a circulation of just 2 million. The Japanese thirst for print appears to be strong while Americans get their news on the internet. With the advent of social media and the proliferation of online news organisations, the print industry is struggling to cope with their dwindling readership. The Irish Times had a circulation of 114,000 in 2004 while in 2011 its circulation had fallen to just over 100,000. If we look at the longer term diminishment of readership over in the UK we can see that Britain’s biggest selling daily broadsheet, The Daily Telegraph, had a circulation of 1.5 million in 1980, whereas it now has 650,000. That is a loss of nearly a million readers in thirty years. The reasons for this decline are manifold.
The largest demographic in which readership is being lost is inevitably that of younger people. According to the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, 65% of people between 18 and 29 now get their news online. How do they do this? They access newspapers’ web formats (if they are free), they use online-specific publications or alternatively they use social media such as Twitter and Facebook. What is being lost in these new media? Former Irish Times editor, Conor Brady, writing in the aforementioned, says there is a denudation of reliability, accuracy and authority. Much of the gathered information on the internet is plagiarised, he says and ‘hardly ever sourced and is frequently misrepresented’. However, young people love to use online media due to the quality of participation that it affords the user. On websites such as Irishtimes.ie or guardian.co.uk, readers can comment on articles, thus creating a veritable live discussion forum which is interactive. Young people are used to, and indeed demand, interaction, to have their say. It is this departure from the ‘newspaper on high’ of old which I believe is the big change-maker in the way we consume the news. Twitter is the culmination of this process, whereby users are now even driving the news story and indeed effecting change through mass and collective participation. We need only look at the recent example of Ryan Giggs and Imogen Thomas. In May 2011, 75,000 Twitter users broke the footballer’s superinjunction which he had in order to suppress information about his alleged affair with Thomas.
Most of the top newspapers have long realised the importance of their online editions. However, the advertising revenue they receive from the web is insufficient to compensate for the loss of circulation of their print formats. They get nothing in monitory terms from the reader itself. The content is free and therefore the readership is relatively high. This is a problem. The London Times recently made the bold move of making their online edition entirely subscription based. Of course, as a result the number of readers fell. When the Times erected their paywall in 2010 they lost 90% of their online readership. This is of course a disheartening figure for similar companies who may have been thinking of following suit. It is little wonder that their competitors such as the Telegraph and the Independent have continued to provide a free service. But the question remains: how does a newspaper in 2012 continue to be relevant and have a decent readership while also covering its costs? What appears to happen is that a newspaper company cuts its staff and fewer journalists do more work. But the resources are not there to provide the same thorough journalistic principles that these institutions once did in the pre-internet age. Former editor of the Los Angeles Times, John S. Carroll says, "Newspapers are doing the reporting in this country. Google and Yahoo aren't those people putting reporters on the street in any number. Blogs cannot afford it”. Carroll resigned in 2005 in the face of severe pressure from his parent company to cut his newsroom staff numbers. The future landscape of the newspaper industry is a rocky terrain. What is certain however is that the young demographic must be addressed. Many young people find newspapers to be too expensive. Ireland is a particularly expensive country for them. The Guardian in the UK costs £1.20 (€1.44), whereas The Irish Times costs €1.90 in this country. The disparity of 46 cent, multiplied over a year, adds up to a substantial difference. The main income from any newspaper is now derived from people over the age of 55 because they can afford it and they are used to traditional models. That section of the readership will not survive forever to support the purchase of newspapers. What will happen in twenty five years time? Will newspapers still exist in their physical manifestation or will we become nostalgic when we see them lining a chest of drawers?
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