Newspapers must reinvent themselves

Bye-bye, newspapers. If you’re reading this on thin paper that folds and crinkles, has many other things on oversized pages and gets ink on your fingers, then you are helping stem the decline of an endangered species.

Sorry to say it, but you may be a dying breed yourself. Between 1998 and 2005, weekday newspaper readers dropped from 58.6 to 51 percent of all adults, according to Newspaper Association of America figures. For 18-24 year olds, the drop was from 43.5 to 38.4 percent, and for 25-34 year olds, readership fell even further, from 45.9 to 36.8 percent. Younger nonreaders are undoubtedly unmarried, since married people read newspapers more often than singles — perhaps to hide behind at breakfast.

argues Rosabeth Moss Kanter in the Miami Herald today

Rosabeth goes onto say

Newspapers don’t have to ignore disinterested potential readers. Niche publications grab young audiences that newspapers lose. For example, School Sports magazine has been growing in local markets while newspapers have reduced coverage of high-school sports.

Wave bye-bye to broadcast television, too. As mass media become niche media, TV suffers from similar afflictions. New media audiences want to be more engaged and in control. They want to:

[1] Direct the action (video and online game players).

[2] Produce the package (on-demand viewing; content recorded for replay).

[3] Create the content (short Web films; blogs).

[4] Develop their own networks (e-mail communities with pirated content; news spread virally by hitting “forward”).

These consumers are not just the young. A British Broadcasting Corporation brainstorming session on the future of the BBC that I attended included a role-playing grandmother who finds video games more interesting than television.

And finally

Newspapers have been pretty good at developing an Internet presence. The problem is that they haven’t yet answered the question of whether a newspaper is the news or the paper. Will they keep saying bye-bye to their journalists and not to their printing plants? Will they keep focusing on which channel of distribution to favor rather than on the quality of their content? Those would be unfortunate choices.