Going digital
Another print media brand name is lowering its flag. Two months after the Newsweek went digital, closing down a legacy of 79 years of continuous print publishing; the New York Times is planning to sell its prestigious Boston Globe, though it is not sure that a buyer could be found.
It will be joining a growing trend of media outlets operating online.
The New York Times acquired the Globe a decade ago for $ 1.1 billion.
But a few years later it continued to operate in the red as the digital age started to eat up in the print media market.
Market analysts expect that the Boston Globe can fetch between $ 150 million to $ 175 million, no more.
That is not only a big drop, but more important it is an indication of the future trend. Going digital seems to be paying off as it generates more revenue from the reader who is using various e-formats online than from advertisements. While circulation, including of a digital one, has generated an amount of $ 781 million, which is up 11 percent, advertisement income on the other hand dropped 7.4 percent to $ 700 million.
In the US for instance, where statistics are available, national newspapers’ advertisements were down by 10 percent during the first nine months of last year and that is according to the Newspapers Association of America.
Moreover, on a planned spending of $ 368 billion in the media field this year, 32.5 percent will go to the digital media, while a lesser percentage of 30.3 percent will go to the print field. That is the future.
With mobile phones taking a bigger chunk of consumers’ activity, growing e-book and e-readers, and social media, publishing has to adjust to the new norms created by the communication revolution.
That trend is not restricted only to the US in particular or Western and developed countries in general, but even in the Middle Eastern region that the trend seems to be gaining momentum too.
A study by the consultancy, Deloitte, called Arab Media Outlook released late last year, said that social media activities led by Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and others that have a 4 percent share of the current market are slated to grow phenomenally in the coming three years with an annual growth rate of 35 percent, which is expected to generate $ 580 million by 2015.
However, though the growth in the digital operations will have its negative impact on the print media, it will not reach the stage of complete disappearance of the newspapers in their traditional known format.
The book, the radio, the video have all survived new forms of communication technology though they have been marginalized in the market.
But the main challenge will relate to the content.
The communication revolution has made significant changes in the relationship between the media and the audience.
The digital age has made it possible to report events in real time as they happen and that is why there is continuous update to websites.
Having the opportunity to see real time coverage of unfolding events makes the audience a participant and undermines, somehow, the role of reporters who used to cover events for that audience.
But since the audience sees events by their own eyes, the importance of having somebody covering those events gets reduced.
More important, the audience can be more active responding positively to what has been reported or aired in the form of a comment or posing a question.
That changes the relationship that used to be a passive one, or a one-way track, which puts a lot of pressure on media, which will be required to operate around the clock to keep pace with events and continue updating throughout the day.
However, one main factor that will keep traditional media in the business in this region for some time to come is that using social media depends on the spread of new media and ability of the people to rely on them more and more.
That is apparently going to happen over time given the fact that new technologies are getting cheaper, stronger and with multipurpose use by the day.
But for the time being changes taking place in the Western countries don’t replicate automatically in this region, though they will eventually.
Moreover, the growing population and younger generation increasingly taking over and representing the bulk of people going digital, will put more pressure on the traditional media on how to cope with these developments, while maintaining at the same time the high professional journalistic standards that were compromised somewhat in the digital age where the work around the clock puts pressure on those standards.
Regardless of the extent of the changing media environment in the region or outside it, the mere fact that media itself becomes a story instead of covering an event is a reflection of a problem, this time a structural one.
This article is exclusive to Arab News.
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