Death of print media? So what?

There is much lamenting about the death about the print media i.e., newspaper and magazines (the most recent in the widely read Trak.in. Well, let me say this very bluntly,  I am not shedding a tear for them. My reasoning is as below.

Newspapers served 2 purposes:
1. Provide timely news and analysis.
2. Provide Classifieds.

Let’s discuss in a bit of details.
1. Provide timely news and analysis: Obvious as it is, the point about media is “Content”. It is not about delivery! So irrespective of whether a company provides it on paper, television, radio or internet, turn to media for content. First it was the advent of radio,then the television and now the internet – they have over the span of 5-6 decades made the newspaper nearly redundant.

Radio and television have reporters on the ground who provide the news closer to real-time compared to a newspaper that arrives in the evening or the following morning. Next, the advent of the worldwide web (www or internet) reduced the dissemination of news to near real time. So apart from the cost of having the reporter on the ground which is common to all the three media, the web reduced operational costs, like the need for infrastructure costs like printing presses for print media or satellites and TV stations to distribute the content.

Like eBooks (electronic books) killed a small part of the book business, so also are the web-based news and blog sites, micro blogging sites like Twitter etc., increasingly used to break news – infrastructure (operational) costs are near zero. No need also for reporter as the people at the scene of action generate the content!

2. Provide Classifieds.
One of the major uses of a newspaper was the “Classifieds” section, which according to Warren Buffet is the money maker (apart from the other advertisements) in the newspaper business. Now classifieds are posted online and that too for free. Anybody can create a classifieds website for free or for a small sum (like my own – www.ownerads.in). Here too, owing to the revenue model being Google Adsense or something of the sort supporting the website, there is no need to charge for posting ads. Thus people post classifieds on the web any time of the day or night, with information placed into appropriate categories for cities, subjects, buy/ sell etc.,. Users edit their own classifieds, can post in as many websites as they want, promote their ads through social bookmarking etc., at zero cost.

Well, given the above 2 reasons, why would people buy newspapers? May be just to have some reading material as they drink their morning coffee or for the convenience of having all the news in one place and which can be read offline (on the bus or train, when there is no power or internet connection).

If newspapers are dying then why would people need weekly magazines? News would be a week old!

It is no surprise that CNN, Forbes, BBC and thousands of newspaper, magazines have woken up to the internet and they have done this for nearly a decade. Now they have taken on web 2.0 social media tools like Twitter, Facebook etc to break the news and provide content. So long as the businesses do not forget that they are in the “content” business as against the media (print, tv etc.) business, they will survive- can’t really say they will be profitable.

You see where this is going? This typhoon called internet or web is felling more trees, tearing apart roofs than meets the eye. We are still seeing only the early yet outer most clouds of the typhoon – the eye is yet to make land fall! The internet is not even two decades old and it is impacting businesses that have run for centuries. Even Warren Buffet will have to sit back and see the impact as his dear stocks might take a big hit.

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