The Future (or lack thereof) of Print

Just so we're all on the same page (no pun intended), I'm writing this blog post from a iPad. I Just wanted to get my potential bias out of the way.

I have been wondering for quite sometime what the fate of print media would be once Internet media came into full swing. I first started developing my hypothesis back in 1999 when I was the webmaster for my high school newspaper. At first I thought online viewership would struggle to surpass our print count. All it took was dropping the URL into the print version to blow that number away. Then a submission to Yahoo! Search pushed the number of daily views to nearly 10 times of our monthly print count. This is where I truly learned the value of online publishing. And you better believe that we never missed getting a story, picture or sports score online. The online edition became an extension of the print edition.

That is the key business model that I think could save newspapers. They need to embrace the web and it's distribution techniques. This is where the true value is in online production; reduction in production costs and the sheer volume of your readership.

The buiness model that works is not to "pay-wall" everything but to simply flip the paradigm. Where physical papers used to cost money and online was a free extension there needs to be a change. Online needs to become the primary method of production. Print doesn't go away but simply becomes a subscription only service or at least a better forecasted print count. Why spend money to print 25,000 physical papers when not even half of those papers are consumed? In the past this hadn't been an issue but with margins diminishing, every unused paper counts.

It's not that print is going to die tomorrow, many people still prefer the feel of a physical paper to the feel of an e-reader. News sources just need to be more intelligent about how they leverage print versus how online outlets are leveraged. There is a delicate balance and while I think some news papers are getting that figured out many can't see that this balance is slowly shifting towards online distributions.