Digital not helping US newspapers
Print Edition
THE grim news for newspapers in the United States: digital is doing little to rescue them from their deepening woes.
Reeling from weak circulation and advertising revenue, the traditional newspaper world faces an ugly picture while social media and tech firms benefit from the shift to digital, a Pew Research Center study released yesterday found.
Average weekday newspaper circulation — print and digital combined — fell 7 percent in 2015, the greatest decline since 2010, Pew’s annual “State of the News Media” report found.
Although digital circulation edged up 2 percent, that amounted to just 22 percent of total circulation, and online subscriptions have done little for the overall revenue picture, Pew said.
It found that total 2015 advertising revenue among publicly traded newspaper companies declined almost 8 percent, reflecting weakness in digital as well as print.
To make matters worse, newspaper newsroom employment fell 10 percent last year, the biggest drop since 2009, the researchers found.
“Newspapers had a near recession-level year,” Pew researcher Jesse Holcomb said.
Major tech companies are reaping most of the revenues from online news, Pew found.
“There is money being made on the web, but news organizations have not been the primary beneficiaries,” the report said.
Total digital advertising spending grew 20 percent last year to around US$60 billion, a higher growth rate than in 2013 and 2014, Pew said.
“But compared with a year ago, even more of the digital ad revenue pie — 65 percent — is now swallowed up by just five tech companies,” the report said, naming Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Twitter.
“Increasingly, the data suggest that the impact these technology companies are having on the business of journalism goes far beyond the financial side to the very core elements of the news industry itself.”
Facebook took in some 30 percent of digital display ad revenue last year, or US$8 billion, according to Pew. Google accounted for 16 percent.
Some news publishers still make profits “but it’s a mixed picture,” while a handful of digital companies “are sucking up the oxygen,” Holcomb said.
Part of the reason for the revenue shift is due to how people discover news — often by happenstance on social networks or by searching online, the researcher added.
“Our relationship with news is in a state of change,” he said. “Most people who say they get news on a platform like Facebook are not necessarily looking for news, news is just one of the things they stumble across.”
Since the Newspaper Association of America stopped reporting revenue figures for the newspaper industry as a whole in 2013, Pew tracked data from the seven publicly traded newspaper groups, which owned some 300 dailies at the end of last year.
- About Us
- |
- Terms of Use
- |
-
RSS - |
- Privacy Policy
- |
- Contact Us
- |
- Shanghai Call Center: 962288
- |
- Tip-off hotline: 52920043
- 沪ICP证：沪ICP备05050403号-1
- |
- 互联网新闻信息服务许可证：31120180004
- |
- 网络视听许可证：0909346
- |
- 广播电视节目制作许可证：沪字第354号
- |
- 增值电信业务经营许可证：沪B2-20120012
Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.
