The media's future is written not in gloom and doom, but shades of grey
So we head into the media decade of living dangerously. Last week, I offered 12 things to keep spirits up; this week, a dirty dozen. But there's still a little cheer around because the bad things aren't all dire, just wholly uncertain. We don't know that they mean nemesis for newspapers, TV, radio and the rest, we just know we aren't quite sure.
GREY AREA 1: Straight on to the net. An unstoppable force of growth and profitability? Perhaps, if you're Amazon or Google – if, that is, you've got something to sell punters want to buy. But the latest list of America's top 30 newspaper websites shows that, year on year, as many have shed readers, and reading time, as have gained it. The mighty New York Times saw its online readers spend only 17 minutes and 17 seconds perusing it in November, compared with 36:32 in 2008. Readers of the LA Times spent a puny seven minutes and seven seconds before clicking off.
And the best-read title in that top 30 – the Atlanta Journal-Constitution – still managed a mere 23:38 through all the days of November combined; the average Facebook user spent 25 minutes there every day. The average stay for all US newspaper websites is four minutes and four seconds a month.
Conclusion: conventional news from newspaper sources has no magic attraction. The big search engines reach almost twice as many users in a month (try Yahoo News on 38.7m in the US last November, as the NY Times struggles in with less than half of that). It may not be news on paper that's fallen out of fashion, just any sort of digital news presented in traditional fashion.
GREY AREA 2: More figures ....
Add new comment