Costs/benefits of newsprint

Last week Merrill Lynch predicted (PaidContent) that it will take 30 years for online revenues to catch up with print revenues for news publishers, and commentators duly scoffed. Shane Richmond at the Telegraph notes that "at some point, probably within the next ten years, print won't be slowly declining anymore, it will fall off a cliff." It's a fair guess and one I've been tempted to make before - that the number of key buying points (media agencies, advertisers) is sufficiently small that when the commercial endgame comes for print it will come more as the sudden crash of a herd stampeding to pastures new than a gradual erosion.

Roy Greenslade laments, noting that he "retain(s) an aching love for the newspaper format" and wondering whether his hopes for the future of print are romantic nonsense. And I'm afraid I'm tempted to conclude that they probably are. Certainly, even Philip Meyer forecasts the death of the last newspaper reader no earlier than September 2043 (OJR) - but of course it will have become uneconomical to produce any newspapers long before the theoretical readership is down to single figures. More importantly however, the attractiveness of the remaining audience to advertisers will have diminished beyond commercial viability even sooner than this. The same crisis faced by terrestrial TV will come to newsprint too: that while there is still an audience, it isn't the (young, affluent, early-adopter) audience that advertisers predominately want to spend their money to reach. I have quoted before Michael Bywater's wonderful claim in his book Lost Worlds;

"the opening up of mass markets after the Second World War meant that marketeers wanted, above all, to find a gullible, insecure, easily led, discontented, foolish, tasteless, evanescent and and, above all, ever-renewing target group to sell to".

Like terrestrial TV, newsprint is a mass medium. In a few years we might reflect sadly on the paradox that thousands, perhaps millions, of people who want to buy a newspaper have no newspaper to buy. It is always gallingly paradoxical to want a thing and yet be told by its potential maker that there is no demand, or at least not enough to demand to justify the thing being made. But, from what we know about the socio-economic requirements of advertisers and the economics of operating a mass medium, it may be a false hope that a dwindling audience of newspaper readers are hanging on to - that so long as they want to buy a newspaper someone will surely print it for them.