25/10/16 - Back to the future: were newspaper publishers wrong to go digital? (13)

https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2016/oct/19/back-to-the-future-were-newspaper-publishers-wrong-to-go-digital

The article started of talking about this man called Jack Shafer, on how he felt about the impact of switching the news platform to online rather than having the more traditional print copies. He started off with saying "What if?". “What if the industry should have stuck with its strengths — the print editions where the vast majority of their readers still reside and where the overwhelming majority of advertising and subscription revenue come from — instead of chasing the online chimera?” Shafer started to wonder that if moving to the online platform was a benefit or if the companies should've just stuck to the print platform. He also went on to say "While print readership is declining, newspaper readers did not drop print in favour of the same newspaper’s online edition". However, people would've thought to believe the opposite of this statement; since there is a major increase and rise in technology, people would've liked to see a little drop from the print platform and making a switch to the online news platform.

• Chyi and Tenenboim studied the online readership of 51 leading US regional newspapers and compared 2011 online readerships with those in 2015.
• Chyi and Tenenboim note that US newspaper industry digital advertising revenue increased from $3bn to only $3.5bn from 2010 to 2014.
• Although print revenues plunged from $22.8bn to $16.4 bn over the same period, they still represented 82% of total newspaper revenue.
• Chyi’s advice to publishers: accept that the days of 25-35% profit margins will never return and be happy with the 5% margins common in other companies. 

In terms of the article itself, it was quite an unusual piece as people would've thought to believe that the Guardian may have talked about something positive about the online platform, since this piece was also shown online and should really be encouraging the audience to read online; instead of people thinking that the print is becoming more of a dying media platform, they believe that it all is dependent on the users themselves. For example, in the article, they talked about how with some particular companies, the audiences didn't make the switch from print to online and most of those print audiences statistics stayed the same. However, these facts were only based on the US, not worldwide.