Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

Refresh. Yesterday's summary posting on the decline-of-the-newspaper discussion that's doing the rounds, is in need of an update as George Will has just added his voice to the debate. Writing in today's Washington Post, Will pours more gloom on newspapering with "Unread and Unsubscribing". Are we entering a "post-journalism age", he asks? He then goes on to point out that we need to think about what's going on in terms of "media" versus "journalism". Excerpt:

"The young are voracious consumers of media, but not of journalism. Sixty-eight percent of children 8 to 18 have televisions in their rooms; 33 percent have computers. And if they could have only one entertainment medium, a third would choose the computer, a quarter would choose television. They carry their media around with them: 79 percent of young people ages 8 to 18 have portable CD, tape or MP3 players. Fifty-five percent have hand-held video game players. Sony's PlayStation Portable, which plays music, games and movies, sold more than 500,000 units in the first two days after its March debut."

Despite the grim outlook for newspapers, print journalism's future may not be as desperate as the commentariat would have us think. The success of NYTimes.com suggests that the way forward lies in the proper porting of content to the internet. This observation is prompted by the truly impressive fact that in March the NYTimes.com site experienced a record-breaking 555 million pageviews. According to the company's press release, the main driver for the growth was content. Money quote:

Pageviews for the National section of NYTimes.com experienced a 96% increase year over year, due to reader interest in the news surrounding Terri Schiavo. Also, pageviews for the Travel section increased 238% year over year, as a result of the site's coverage on a number of topics of interest including Paris restaurants and Maureen Dowd's article about visiting Cancun, Mexico, entitled "Girls Gone Mild." The Real Estate section grew 22% year over year, with several articles on a potential real estate market bubble. College basketball, baseball's spring training and the steroids debate fueled growth of the Sports section with pageviews up 12% year over year.

A 96 percent increase year over year! So, printed newspapers may be on the way to the graveyard, but that's the medium, not the message. If you have the right content, and you have the right strategy for the net — RSS feeds, audio, video, lots of bloggers linking in — and you offer services such as "mail this article to a friend" and e-mail newsletters, and you keep tweaking your site and you market it cleverly, you stand a chance of making the transition. If you don't do any of these things, or do them badly, you'll be unsubscribed and unread.