The
bleak future of newspapers
I will
write in this column, as often as I can, about the future. Meaning what we can
anticipate in the next few years, when most of us will still be around. It is
said that those of us who will live on to about 2045 or so might live forever.
That being the year by when it will have been possible to create an artificial
intelligence so superior to man’s that all of our problems, including the
biological, will be resolved. But 2045 is far away. Three decades of change at
the pace of technology’s exponential growth will produce a world a hundred
times more different in 2045 than 2016 is from 1986, a year I remember vividly.
And we will explore and speculate on some aspects of it in time.
Today,
let me look at a shorter time frame and at a field I know well: The medium this
column is being printed on.
How
long do newspapers have? My guess is another four years. By December 2020, we
will all (those of us who are still around) have written our farewell columns.
The newspaper will have lost the paper. The physical object will no longer
exist and the reason is not that difficult to understand: It will make no
economic sense. It already makes no sense. A 24-page broadsheet newspaper costs
about ~14 to produce — that’s just the paper and the printing. It sells for ~4,
of which a part is spent on distribution.
Who
or what pays for the other 80 per cent? Advertisements, which must also pay for
the other costs: Journalists and staff, plus the things a business needs.
This
model is becoming unsustainable given the competition from modern media, which
is appropriating a larger share of advertising every year. And it is being
helped along by the shrinking number of newspaper buyers and readers in India.
The annual readership survey has not been published in India for over two
years, but we don’t need data to notice that fewer people bother with
newspapers. This trend of newspaper decline has been recorded in Europe and
America for decades, but because the newspaper there is not cheap (being about
~40 or more per copy) the decline has been long and slow. In India, it will
come so quickly that it will take us aback.
Unless
existing readers can be convinced to pay more for their news, and this has been
tried unsuccessfully so often that we can forget about it, there is a grim
inevitability about the trajectory of the industry.
The
only thing left is to guess when the thing will crash. My money says before
December 2020. The question is: Having lost “paper”, will the newspaper retain
at least “news”? No, it cannot. No daily news publication today makes enough
online subscription and advertising revenue to sustain a team of editors and
beat reporters, the core of a newspaper. When Donald Trump won, publications
like the
New
York Times and the Guardian pleaded for money from readers, saying their
reporting was particularly needed in this time. It has come to this. Newspapers
are begging us to keep them in business as the water goes over their heads.
It
could be argued that something will replace the newspaper, or already has, for
instance television news or social media. The limitations of the TV format have
made that industry focus on debate and opinion rather than reporting. This will
not change. And Twitter, however many people are plugged into it, is no real
substitute for a network of reporters who work on beats. Crowd-sourced and
unedited and unverified information is a different thing from the formal and
focused material produced by beat reporters paid to return to the same material
daily. So we must assume that “news” as we now know it, will also vanish with
the newspaper.
There
are probably 5,000 or so full-time newspaper reporters in India today. Their
input will go missing. There will still be opinion and analysis, as there is
also today online, but the hard stuff will be gone. This will cripple democracy
and human rights. Issues already underplayed or ignored by media today, such as
the happenings in Kashmir, the Northeast and the Adivasi belt, will disappear
from the national conversation. Of course, rural stories have long found no
place in English papers, but the end of newspaper reporting will produce a
landscape so barren that it will be terrifying. The interesting thing is: Most
of us will be around to see it.
The
cultural move to digital is also affecting other areas. It may surprise readers
to learn that Bollywood revenues are flat because the number of tickets being
sold in cinema halls is falling. One would think that it is a growing industry
poised in a decade to take on Hollywood. No. Fewer Indians are going to the
movies. That number has been dropping for several years so we cannot blame
demonetisation or anything else. The fact is that people are watching and
listening to stuff on their mobile phone. The material there is often just as
entertaining as what is to be found in the multiplex — and it’s usually free.
There
is some scope for film producers to make alittle money from digital — Netflix,
the caller tune, the ringtone, the wallpaper and so on. For the newspaper
proprietor there is none and he will have to start making hard choices across
India only a few months from now.
Newspapers
will lose first paper and then news, and the first sinkings will be coming up
soon. The best thing about a quality newspaper is, for me, its serendipity. You
flip its pages and come across unexpectedly, on your own, without a link from
someone else, a good read. I will miss that most, and I hope I can provide a
few such moments for you in the time we have together.
With
paper gone, news will disappear by 2020. And, with it, the serendipity of
discovering a good read
Source | Business
Standard | 6 January 2017
Regards
Pralhad Jadhav
Senior Manager @ Library
Khaitan & Co
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