The Slow Decline of Print Media
From the Toronto Star
BOSTON– The Christian Science Monitor said today it will become the first national newspaper to drop its daily print edition and focus on publishing online, succumbing to the financial pressure squeezing its industry harder than ever.
Come April, the Boston-based general-interest paper – founded in 1908 and the winner of seven Pulitzer Prizes – will print only a weekend edition after struggling financially for decades, its editor announced today.
The Monitor's circulation has fallen from a peak of 230,000 in 1970 to about 50,000 now, while its online traffic has soared. The newspaper gets about 5 million page-views per month, compared with about 4 million five years ago and 1 million a decade ago.
Ten years ago when the net started to take off, everyone predicted the death of traditional print media.
But it hasn't happened as quickly as some had prognosticated, leading others to argue that there will always be newspapers.
I'm not so sure anymore.
The paper is not the first but is the most prominent to scale back its print version in favor of online news. In April, The Capital Times, of Madison, Wis., switched to publishing mainly on the Internet. The Daily Telegram, in Superior, Wis., announced in July that it would print only two issues a week and its Web site would become the primary source for daily news. In Ohio, several local papers plan to print their final Monday editions next week.
UPDATE:
I just wanted to add a quick comment to this post on reflection. To be clear, I don't think newspapers are going to disappear overnight now that the net has matured. I suspect it will take another decade, at least for many print publications to move strictly to the web.
I also don't think the organizations themselves will disappear along with their print editions. They'll be markedly different, but then again, the newspaper newsroom of 2008 is markedly different than the one of 1908.
I once wrote that newspapers had a future because technology had not evolved enough to make it easy and convenient to take the net anywhere you wanted to have it. But the rise of full-featured smartphones with web browsing capability and wireless access may mark the beginning of the end for print's advantage in that area.
