For years now, the publishing industry has been struggling with the problem that print is in decline while online readership is growing, but that the latter isn't making up for the revenue losses in the former.
The issue is large, complex and multi-faceted, but just a glance at print circulation numbers is enough to underscore the point.
While the number of newspapers being published is fairly steady, the Newspaper Association of America reports circulation is plummeting. Here's the trend that alarms publishers:
Bang. Ten years, and 20% of newspaper readership has just vanished. If that doesn't sound too bad, consider that the remainder is probably poorer on average (by correlation with less access to technology) or is going to die soon, or both.
The generational gap in who reads what is often very apparent in social conversations. Young people tend to live on their mobiles and get all their news online, whereas older people persist in the delusion that telephones are for making calls, and still read the print newspapers that arrive on the doorstep in the morning. Sadly, the two seldom meet.
Referring others to online articles to facilitate discussion is easy. You simply send a link via e-mail, Facebook or Twitter. But how often have you heard your mother or grandfather refer to a story in the newspaper? And how often did you actually have that newspaper handy so you could read the story for yourself? How often have you had to search online for a story you saw in print, or a headline you saw on a lamp post, just so you could forward it to your online friends?
The generational gap in who reads what is often very apparent in social conversations.
Ivo Vegter, ITWeb contributor
Would it not be convenient if aficionados of dead-tree newsprint could send you links as easily as they could do so from a Web browser?
It seems a simple idea, yet how many print publications do you know that even include URLs for online versions of an article? That's the least they could do, but it still takes retyping, which isn't convenient. There is a better way. Bar codes may be decades old, but they remain perfectly useful devices. We use them for scanning retail products, or issuing machine-readable tickets. Why don't newspapers use them?
Shouldn't newspaper or magazine readers be able to use their mobile phones to scan a QR code (a standard form of 2D bar code) at the end of an article they find interesting, to generate a link to the online version of the story, conveniently packaged to send via SMS, e-mail or a social network?
Granted, they take up quite a lot of space, but the increase in readership of the story, the social media buzz and the ability to interact with readers and draw them into the conversation a newspaper creates, would more than make up for a column-inch per story dedicated to a bar coded link.
Bridging the chasm between print and online too often seems like an afterthought, and many publications limit themselves to republishing online comments or layouts. However, a printout of a Facebook page or a list of SMS messages hardly constitutes tight integration.
So please, print editors. As much as there still is a market for print, and for all its nostalgic charm, give the online generation a clickable link to your dead-tree paper. Let them connect with your traditional print readership. Links you can scan with your mobile phone are not that hard to implement.
Bar coding print stories would go a long way to avoiding those awkward conversations about a newspaper story that everyone has read except you, because you've abandoned the tradition of eating boiled eggs with black fingers on a Sunday morning.
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