Why The Web Can Never Replace Print Media

I read a shocking statistic in a book I have been reading lately, Clear Blogging: How People Are Changing the World and How You Can Join Them. Author Bob Walsh refences the Web site SaveJournalism.org, which referenced a reported 44,000 news industry emloyees who had lost their jobs due to layoffs and cutbacks in recent years. I took a look at the site and wasn't able to find these figures, but found another very informative site about the massive layoffs that have occured in the U.S. since the dot.com bust. I Want Media's Layoff's page has numbers going all the way back to May 2000 when CBS layed off 24 employees in its CBS Internet Group.

I know there are a lot of reasons why the media business is in turmoil, and I won't try to pretend that I know even the half of it. Since this blog is dedicated to editorial content on the Web I can't help but wonder why layoffs continue in the name of concentrating on the Web as the most viable business model. It is true that a great deal of people get their news primarily from the Web these days. But according to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, the self- billed independent public opinion survey research project that studies attitudes toward the press, politics and public policy issues, only slightly more than 26% of the online news audience got their news on the Web every day in 2006, down from almost 35% in 2005 (see "The Percentage Who Get News Online Everyday, 1995-2006.")

So what about the other 75%? I would have to say that the people in this group are those individuals that I sit next to on the subways every morning who put their Blackberrys in their holsters while they read the day's edition of the New York Times. They are the people who read the cover story of the latest issue of Forbes to the end and rip it out (as much as it pains me, since I don't even dog-ear pages of my magazines) for a friend.

I saw a special on PBS (sorry, no links guys) that talked about how some well-faring newspapers were able to figure out the balance between what content is best presented in print and online. Newspapers really had trouble after the dot.com boom because all those classifieds that readers and newspapers counted on so dearly went straight to the Web--Career Builder having the biggest draw for the employement section of the classifieds.

Doing classifieds on the Web makes sense. It makes searching for jobs, garage sales, etc. much easier for the reader. But there are some things that you just can't do well online. In one usability study, Jakob Nielsen and Noa Loranger, co-authors of Prioritizing Web Usability, found that participants with "high" Web experience spent an average of 25 seconds on a Web site's homepage and 45 seconds on a site's interior page. Given that users could theoretically read approximately read 200 words per minute, they said, the user would spend more of that 25 to 45 seconds scanning the page's navigation than reading the text.
So where is the balance? Local newspapers are letting the national newspapers and wires tell the big stories and focusing on the really local news for their print editions. Hyperlocal is a term I have heard thrown around a couple of times, but I haven't been in the newspaper biz for a couple of years now. Moms and Dads will always go out and buy a dozen copies of the paper when little Billie's soccer team gets a spread on the cover of the sports section.

Magazines are not daily publications. Therefore it's natural to concentrate on the kind of trend reporting makes readers take the staples out of the binding and tape a foldout to the wall of their cublicle.

There is some content that you would think is too sacred to get caught up in this whole print versus Web controversy. Former U.S. News & World Report chief political correspondent Roger Simon didn't think he was going to be asked to leave when the weekly news magazine cut 10 staffers in October 2005 to trim the fat and focus on its coverage on the Web. In U.S. News Gives a Top Political Writer the Pink Slip Simon says, "There were rumors that we were going to have layoffs, but I really didn't think I'd be among them. I thought I had a terrific year."

Simon had just won a National Headliner Award.