According to Henry Blodget, who essentially argues the entire kit and kaboodle of print journalism is spinning rapidly down the toilet, with essentially no hope of recovery. Among his overall grim observations:
- As circulations and ad revenue continue to fall, print economies-of-scale will reverse, cutting further into already shrinking print margins.
- As "green business" practices take hold, a new generation of consumers will come to view the newspaper industry as a horrifically wasteful polluter that eats forests, gobbles fuel and electricity, and farts untold amounts of hydrocarbons into the atmosphere--all to deliver information that might have been interesting yesterday.
- A generation of newspaper ad salespeople and ad sales buyers will gradually retire or quit, and advertisers will increasingly ask themselves why they are spending billions on ads they have no idea whether anyone looks at.
- As financial and environmental pressures increase and a better grasp of reality sets in, more papers will opt to do what the Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin, did last weekend: Shut down their print businesses, fire a third of their staff, and put what's left online.
And good riddance--if not to the staff, at least to papers. And a hearty welcome to a slightly cleaner atmosphere and less need for recycling.
Of course the bright side is that all the money currently being spent on print will shift magically to...online! Places like...Silicon Alley Insider! In fact, exactly 0 percent of money will go to print:
Fate of $42 Billion of 2007 Newspaper Print Ad Spending in 2017
- Surviving newspapers: $10 billion (25%)
- Magazines: $0
- TV: $0
- Outdoor: $2 billion (5%)
- Digital: $30 billion (70%)
Hey, I have no desire to be seen as a pollyanna -- there is certainly going to be an economic shakeup in print. But advertising is driven to great content, and great content, contrary to the meme out there, actually wants to put dinner on someone's table. SAI is currently successful (if it is) because there is interesting writing and observation up on the site. The Economist is growing (hey, what about that 0 percent growth for magazines Henry) because of great content. Conde Naste is investing in Portfolio because, well, I don't know, they have not seen their future death yet.
I'm not optimistic about the future of print journalism broadly, I'm hopeful. As Cornell West notes, optimism is:
“based on the notion that there’s enough evidence that allows us to think that things are going to be better.” But hope - hope is saying, “it doesn’t look good at all - so we’re going to make a leap of faith and create new possibilities based on new visions and allow us to engage in heroic actions against the odds.”