Newspapers to Become Mostly Online Entities

Portability still an issue

Within a decade, newspapers will evolve into mostly online entities, according to Ken Doctor, analyst at research and advisory firm Outsell, who cites results of a survey of major newspaper publishers and readers, writes MediaPost (via MarketingVOX). “It’s moving in that direction at different rates for different publishers, [but] the basic trend is unmistakable,” he is quoted as saying. He adds that “content companies need to be able to ‘publish once and distribute many,’ meaning you take the content and distribute it to specific targeted sub-audiences, sometimes through print, sometimes through desktop or laptop, sometimes through mobile.”

Doctor also points out that content-production cost structures would need to be reworked to include faster-paced, 24-hour publishing that to a large degree circumvents the current cumbersome editing and production systems and takes into account audio and video.

He stresses that among the consumers of news are not only readers but also aggregators such as Google. Newspapers must accordingly adapt, making news easier to sort through and classify; they will also need to explore the repercussions on monetization, for example “publishers can license the content and have an ad that will ride along with it wherever it goes - basically saying, ‘You can do whatever you want with this, but this ad has to be there too.’”

Talk about the dawn of digital newspapers has been prompted (again) by the successful redesign of the online version of The New York Times.