There’s been plenty written about the death spiral that America’s newspaper industry finds itself stuck in — here’s an amazing summary of the recent online debates — and I’ve spent a lot of time writing on this issue here in the past, too. Ben Compaine, one of America’s sharpest media analysts and the co-author of the classic study Who Owns the Media?, has added his own two cents in his latest essay over at the Rebuilding Media blog. Like everything Ben writes, it is well worth reading:
If newspapers have essentially been able to thrive on the revenue from advertisers alone (again, with cost of printing more or less covered by circulation revenue), why are they having so much trouble today? The answer is not one single factor, but a major contributor is that newspapers – whether print or digital—are just worth less to advertisers than they were 20 years ago. Back then, local advertisers did not have many options for reaching the mass local audience. What was the alternative for auto dealers? For real estate agents? Supermarkets or department stores? For some, direct mail was one possible option. But that was about it. Using pre-prints instead of ROP became attractive for some large display advertisers, leaving the publishers with a piece of the cash flow. Advertisers were hit with regular rate increases. And they pretty much had to pay, The publishers made good money.
But then a double whammy. Just about the time the Internet became a real alternative for classified listings—think Craigslist, Monster.com, eBay, Autotrader.com—and for retailers—think DoubleClick, Google, et al—the boys at the cable operators had perfected the insertion of highly local spots into their feeds. Between 1989 and 2007 local cable advertising increased from $500 million to $4.3 billion—or from 0.4% of all advertising to 1.6%. Advertising in newspapers fell from 26% to 15% in this period. Although some of the highly local advertisers going to cable may have taken some of their funds from budgets for radio or other local media, it is probable that a significant share came from the hides of newspapers. I estimate perhaps up to 20% of the decline in local newspaper advertising share can be attributed to local cable spots.
The other whammy, the gorilla in the room, is Internet advertising. No need to elaborate. But its impact on newspapers is not just that it has siphoned off dollars per se. Much more importantly is that the Internet has given most advertisers greater market power against newspaper publishers. Many big advertisers—like car dealers, real estate offices and big box retailers—don’t need the newspapers as much.
Ben’s got it exactly right. The decline of newspapers comes down to the death of “protectable scarcity” (thanks to Canadian media expert Ken Goldstein for that phrase). There’s just too much other competition out there online already for our eyes and ears. We’re witnessing substitution effects on a scale never seen in the media world, with disruptive digital technologies and networks splintering our attention spans. That de-massification of media means that high fixed cost endeavors like daily newspapers are not going to be able to sustain the cross-subsidies they’ve long gotten from advertisers.
If you want to boil the newspaper death spiral down to an equation, it would look something like this:
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