The Future of Print Media
A journalist friend, let's call him "Eben", recently asked me for career advice. Having risen quickly up the totem-pole, Eben is now a reporter for Time magazine, which is, by any standard, a pretty big accomplishment for a 27 year-old.
Eben's question was: Which part of the print journalism landscape is likely to be safe from the on-going business model disruption currently afflicting newspapers and (some) magazines? Put another way: What is the print media landscape of the future going to look like?
Any prediction for the future of print media needs to start by acknowledging the impact of the internet. Starting a website is easy. Getting people to look at your website is more difficult - but clearly not too difficult (you're reading this!). Making (some) revenue from selling ads around your website is very easy - Google will do it for you instantly.
Sites like MySpace and Facebook generate billions of page impressions at very little cost, allowing them to serve ads at ridiculously low prices to advertisers. Right now, I can get Google to show pretty much any ad I want 1,000 times for less than $1, because there is so much inventory available.
What does this mean for newspapers and magazines? It means that, with the exception of some high-prestige titles, it will be very difficult to sustain ad pricing levels at a level high enough to support expensive news gathering organizations.
I expect that we are entering a world in which (1) most news is reported by networks like the AP and syndicated across the entire web; and (2) a small group of prestigious publications charge high cover prices / online subscriptions for high-quality investigative reporting.
Not a particularly pretty picture for those of us who believe that high-quality investigative journalism widely-read is critical for the health of democracies, but you can't fight the market forever.
Eben's question was: Which part of the print journalism landscape is likely to be safe from the on-going business model disruption currently afflicting newspapers and (some) magazines? Put another way: What is the print media landscape of the future going to look like?
Any prediction for the future of print media needs to start by acknowledging the impact of the internet. Starting a website is easy. Getting people to look at your website is more difficult - but clearly not too difficult (you're reading this!). Making (some) revenue from selling ads around your website is very easy - Google will do it for you instantly.
Sites like MySpace and Facebook generate billions of page impressions at very little cost, allowing them to serve ads at ridiculously low prices to advertisers. Right now, I can get Google to show pretty much any ad I want 1,000 times for less than $1, because there is so much inventory available.
What does this mean for newspapers and magazines? It means that, with the exception of some high-prestige titles, it will be very difficult to sustain ad pricing levels at a level high enough to support expensive news gathering organizations.
I expect that we are entering a world in which (1) most news is reported by networks like the AP and syndicated across the entire web; and (2) a small group of prestigious publications charge high cover prices / online subscriptions for high-quality investigative reporting.
Not a particularly pretty picture for those of us who believe that high-quality investigative journalism widely-read is critical for the health of democracies, but you can't fight the market forever.
Labels: future, internet, magazines, media, newspapers
posted by Moses Kagan at
2:36 AM
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