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Is Old Media a Thing Of the Past?

Trends in newspaper cutbacks and Internet growth may not be obvious

October 29, 2008
Where do you get your news? If you said online, you could be one of the driving forces turning the media world upside down.

Daily newspaper circulation is falling as long time readers literally die off, replaced by a generation of young adults that grew up on the Internet, and watches late night comedy shows instead of traditional news programs.

Daily newspaper circulation is down nearly five percent in one year. At the same time, the costs of publishing a newspaper continue to climb.

The latest victim is the venerable Christian Science Monitor, which announced Tuesday that it would end 100 years as a daily newspaper and begin publishing weekly next April. The newspaper says it is losing $18.9 million a year on revenue of $12.5 million. It will continue to publish daily, but will do so only online.

The Los Angeles Times this week dismissed another 75 members of the editorial staff, as it fights to stop the flow of red ink. That's on top of the 135 reporters and editors the Times let go back in July.

The result? Overall media saturation.

"The way media saturation works is that people don't actually drop their old habits -- or if they do, they do very slowly over a long period of time -- but they create new habits very quickly," said Jay Newell, an assistant professor in ISU's Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication and lead author of the study.

Newell joined prominent media researcher Joseph Pilotta, vice president of research for the consumer intelligence firm BIGresearch and a former communication professor for The Ohio State University; and John Thomas, a graduate student in ISU's Greenlee School, on the study. They analyzed data collected in a four-year (2003-06) biannual online media consumption survey of between 12,000 and 15,000 people, conducted by BIGresearch. Their results are summarized in a paper titled "Mass Media Displacement and Saturation," which will be published in an upcoming issue of the International Journal on Media Management.

The study identified these significant trends:

The overall consumption of advertiser-supported mass media increased over the four-year period, although the magnitude of that change tended to be small.

Increased use of new media occurred at a more rapid pace than decreases in the use of traditional media.

Traditional media maintained or increased usage during key revenue-making dayparts, such as morning drive for broadcast radio and prime time for television.

What's behind the seeming contradiction?

"It could be that newspaper declines are being overstated," Newell said. "Many of the circulation drops are due to newspapers cutting back on editions that are distributed far from the city and surrounding suburbs. The people who don't get those papers could be reading local papers. Remember, too, that my study looks at newspaper readership, while newspapers report on circulation."

Newell said the numbers showed that the percentage of people who said they typically read a newspaper -- in the times that you'd expect them to be reading a newspaper -- has remained stable over the last five years.

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