When I started this blog in 2006, Twitter was three months old and Facebook was on the verge of providing public access. Google was up and running, turning a profit, and just beginning to destroy the business model of newspapers.
Since then, the disruption to traditional media has accelerated. While lamenting the loss of newsprint, I envisioned a world where journalism would thrive despite its passing.
Thus far, it hasn’t worked out that way. I know journalism’s future is online and the digital deniers are fooling themselves if they think mass-market newspapers will survive. But we need to beware of losing what we have.
I think print in future will largely serve a niche market (a reality already for magazines). An educated, affluent elite will most likely be prepared to pay for the pleasure of getting ink on their hands.
What is worrying is whether anyone can find a business model to support independent, trustworthy, quality journalism on a large enough scale to stage a daily national conversation.
Equally problematic is the growing use of social media to access news. Aside from questions about the “echo chamber” or “filter bubble” effect, will it improve the spread of news and information?
By chance, as I was preparing to write this final blog piece, I heard from a colleague at City, University of London, Neil Thurman.
He has just published a study, Newspaper consumption in the mobile age, which shows that 89% of newspaper reading is still in newsprint, with just 7% via mobile devices and 4% on PCs.
The study by Dr Thurman (also of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich) relies on data from the UK National Readership Survey (NRS) for print and from comScore for online.
It is the first research to comprehensively account for the time spent reading newspapers via mobile devices.
Although online editions have doubled or tripled the number of readers that national newspapers reach, Thurman argues that this increased exposure disguises huge differences in attention paid by print and online readers.
He said: “My research shows that while print newspapers are read for an average of 40 minutes per day, online visitors to the websites and apps of those same newspapers spend an average of just 30 seconds per day.
“Scale those numbers up and you can see why newspapers still rely on print for the vast majority of the attention they receive.”
Fascinatingly, the data almost exactly mirrors the split in newspapers’ print/digital revenues (88% to 12%) as reported in last month’s NMA/Deloitte report. As Thurman notes: “It looks like revenues closely match audience attention.”
His study covered 11 UK national newspaper brands, using a full year’s worth of data (from April 2015 to March 2016).
As well as shedding new light on newspapers’ multi-platform performance, the research is the first to follow Ofcom’s recommendation that market share be “calculated from time-spent”.
Dr Thurman added: “My calculations show the UK national newspaper market is more concentrated than is commonly believed, with one title having close to a 30% market share.”
Full disclosure: I teach at City, University of London
*An earlier version of this article referred wrongly to an earlier study