Print Can Still Trump Online News

It’s been a tough time for print media. Economic difficulties have seen a big fall in advertising revenue, and newspaper sales have been falling. It’s led to an increasing number of blog articles or social media discussions that suggest that the printed newspaper is a dying industry. That’s not the case, and those discussions exaggerate the problem as well as exaggerating the impact of blogs as a legitimate competition. Established newspapers and publications still carry a significant weight, and the printed word still has an importance beyond transitory online discussion.

At the start of May, Britain’s broadsheet Daily Telegraph newspaper started a series detailing expense claims filed by British Members of Parliament (MPs). In the month since this story began it has become the biggest ongoing news story in the UK, has led to a number of ministerial resignations, caused a collapse in support for the Labour government. At the same time it’s seen the Daily Telegraph increase its readership and significantly improve its advertising revenues.

A Powerful Influence

The MPs’ expenses story is a demonstration of the continuing power and influence of the print media. It may well lead to the resignation of the Prime Minister before the next election. It has probably confirmed Labour’s defeat in that election and therefore a change of government. Only the wider demographic reach and most trusted nature of a major broadsheet newspaper could have achieved such an impact.

If a similar story had been released on a blog it would have reached a much smaller audience. It would have been more subject to being “brushed under the carpet” by British politicians. Few blogs would have had the investigative capacity to continue to dig for the story, uncovering new revelations at regular intervals. It’s unlikely that a story on a blog would have been picked up so quickly by the wider television and news media outlets, and at such length.

Learning Lessons From Online

That’s not to say that online journalism doesn’t have an impact. We saw that over a decade ago when The Drudge Report was the first outlet to break the news of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. That was a demonstration, however, of the internet’s capacity to break news but not to reach the widest audience. The Lewinsky scandal may have broken on Drudge, but it didn’t become the massive news story until it was picked up by traditional and trusted media outlets. Things have changed little in the last decade, the traditional news media is still far more trusted than any blog or recent online publication.

The Daily Telegraph has also taken lessons in the way in which it has released the news of the expenses scandal. Anyone who has read online advice about how to write good blog posts and develop an audience will have identified some of the Telegraph’s methods. They didn’t release all the information at once, they drip fed it in a series that could continually develop an audience. They kept their focus tight – e.g. specifically examining the expenses of a particular party, or the Cabinet. They heavily promoted future topics to encourage repeat readers.

Print Media Is Developing, Not Dying

The most successful print media in the future is likely to be the same titles that we know today. This will be particularly true in countries like the UK where single titles can effectively cover a national agenda – as contrasted with the United States where even the “national” newspapers like the New York Times are effectively locally focused.

We’ll see continued developments of those newspapers’ online presence of course, but there will remain a demand for the printed page as well. It’s the “front page splash” of major newspapers that continues to break the news for the majority of people, not the faster reacting blogs and social media services. Those blogs and social media services are important, but while they may break the news in the first instance, it’s print media that will take it to the masses for the forseeable future.