Print media is dead! Long live print media!
That was the original headline of my article in the Sept. 9 issue of the Uniter, about the resurgence of print media in southern Manitoba.
It was changed somewhere along the editing assembly line, but that’s neither here nor there. However, here’s some other interesting news in Canada’s print media landscape:
According to Maclean’s, their circulation has increased by two per cent this year, and their single copies have more than doubled, citing recent numbers by the Audit Bureau of Circulations.
Maclean’s credits this largely to their recent design overhaul, and improving and expanding the amount of words and stories in each issue. According to them, each issue has almost as many words as the average novel. They basically now have a larger, prettier magazine on stands every week.
It reminds me something Duncan McMonagle, journalism instructor over at Red River College, touched on during our conversation on this subject: give readers something worth paying for, and they’ll pay for it - “Whether the thing they want is local news, or whether they want long, long stories a la the Economist, with great detail, or whether they want to see live streaming of their kid’s soccer team playing on Sunday morning,” he says.
Yeah, the Internet is wreaking havoc with print media business models. But it doesn’t mean existing newspapers and magazines can’t adjust their game plan to combat against floundering subscription bases. Having a website doesn’t magically put you in the black again.
The buzzword lately for local papers has been “hyper-local,” scaling back to an intense focus on solely the city/community on which you’re reporting about. But the Winnipeg Sun has maybe, what, four pages of local news? The size of the Winnipeg Free Press broadsheet is also shrinking, they’ve lost a number of great reporters over the years, and their new Sunday tabloid, On7 - while better written and more aesthetically pleasing than it’s competition - hasn’t been doing too well.
This is not unique to Winnipeg. Local news organizations continue to gut their local reporting teams, run more wire content, and undercut the biggest value they provide to their subscribers. Hard-hitting, investigative reporting is being replaced with news driven by a press release.
Yet, in the face of declining ad revenues across the board in Canada, Maclean’s is investing in their product and, so far, appears to be coming out stronger. You have to spend money to make money, right?
Right now, the journalism industry is in the exact same position as the porn industry - everyone is sharing and downloading it for free without realizing producers need to get paid to pay models, photographers, etc. to put it out in the first place. Just like companies need to pay reporters and photographers and editors to collect the world’s stories and put it out there for you to read. No one’s going to do that for free. And one day, the news aggregators might not have anything to aggregate anymore.