Newspapers Are Dying in America, But Thriving Elsewhere
Everywhere you look, you see signs that print media is on the decline. People pull out their iPads to read magazines, they don't want to be bothered with the physical thing anymore. Because of a lack of interest, print magazines are getting less ad dollars from companies, thus keeping them afloat is harder than ever. According to The New York Times, magazine ad pages in 2011 dropped by three percent when compared to 2010. That decline is expected to continue, too. For the fourth quarter, the drop was even steeper; as ad pages fell eight percent. It's so bad that Newsweek announced that after nearly a century of publication the magazine would be going completely digital.
Newspapers aren't doing any better. We hate to cite the Times again, but even it — the biggest, most well-respected paper in the United States — saw its print ad dollars drop seven percent in 2011's fourth quarter. In a study by the Pew Institute, only 23 percent of Americans admitted to reading a print paper. That's down a staggering 18 percent since 2002. Compare that with only a six percent drop of people who read a print magazine and you can see, in the sad battle to see which print media dies first, it's most likely newspapers. Well, perhaps we should clarify that by saying "newspapers... In the United States."
In Germany, things are quite the opposite. According to a survey, almost 70 percent of Germans said that they read a newspaper daily. Verlagsgruppe Rhein Main, the publishing company that produces daily German papers such as Allgemeine Zeitung, wants to keep that going. It's plan? A newspaper titled "Kruschel," which is aimed at 7-to-11 year old children.
Kruschel seems like a crazy idea, but it's working. The weekly paper already has about 2,100 subscriptions per month. This is because in Germany, reading a newspaper is practically considered a citizen's duty. It's wrong not to read one. "Parents want their children to be informed and for them to be able to talk about and have their own opinions on these things," Kruschel's editor-in-chief, Eva Fauth, told Spiegel. That's why it's working, because it's a paper designed to keep that culture going, despite the financial pitfalls. "With Kruschel, you can't earn money now," explains Fauth." But that's not the first goal. It's not that we don't want to earn money ever, but for now it's an investment in the future."
Germans aren't the only ones who appreciate the printed newspaper. In India, newspapers are thriving because of a unique way of pumping them full of cash. "At the Times of India, for example, celebrities and advertisers pay the paper to have its reporters write advertorials about their brands in its supplementary sections; the newspaper enters into private-treaty agreements with some advertisers, accepting equity in the advertisers’ firms as partial payment," explains a recent article in The New Yorker. Of course that comes with some dangers; namely that it more than tarnishes a paper's journalistic integrity. But the point is that India is dedicated to making print papers relevant and profitable.
This is the difference between our nation and places like Germany and India: The amount of dedication to the printed product. The newspaper business is dying because we're letting it die. One day when there is no longer the printed Times or Wall Street Journal, we'll all look back and wonder what happened. But the truth is we saw the end of print coming, and for better or worse, we welcomed it.
[Pic via Flickr - Shannon Hauser]
