The vanishing point for print moves closer…

John V Willshire on May 27, 2010

There’s an interesting piece from Robert Andrews on paidcontent.org (HT Gerd Leonhard) rounding up some predictions from the newspaper industry themselves on when they’ll be winding up their print runs…

…the ‘sunset of print’ as Madi Solomon of the FT referred to it as:

Solomon says the FT is committing to “less print” and says the FT sees a five-year trajectory for having exited print in substantial part. “They’re not saying that, by five years, they’ll completely stop it, but they do see that the sunset is going to be in about five years.”

 

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Now, five years probably seems like a long time… after all, five years ago there was no Youtube.

But now that the newspaper industry in particular is in the mindset that they will stop print (perhaps they’ve moved through the Kubler-Ross model… denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance), I wonder if it will be even quicker…

…after all, if it’s losing you money, you know you’re going to stop, and you’re developing alternatives, the logical thing to do is switch over as quickly as possible.

Which goes back to the Vanishing Point for media I talked about a while back.  Whilst we may expect the ‘vanishing point’ of media vehicles to be a little while after the returns from things like advertising (blue line) have dropped below the costs (red line)…

 

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…the real vanishing point comes a lot sooner… as soon as costs exceed income, and there is a viable alternative model to jump to (which is what makes the iPad so attractive for newspaper publishers), then newspapers don’t make economic sense, so production stops…

 

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…even though there will still be advertisers who would have spent money with those newspapers.

I guess it all means it’s not just newspapers that need to be experimenting with new ideas… existing advertisers need to be willing to help find new and better ways of connecting with people through these news organisations. 

Which needs less ‘prove to me that this will definitely work’ and more ‘let’s give this a go and see what we can do…’.

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