Week 7 - 'Back to the future: were newspaper publishers wrong to go digital?'

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

• “almost the entire newspaper industry got it wrong? What if, in the mad dash to put up editorial content on to the web, editors and publishers made a colossal business blunder that wasted hundreds of millions of dollars?”
• Chyi and Tenenboim studied the online readership of 51 leading US regional newspapers and compared 2011 online readerships with those in 2015 -  discovered that more than half of them had lost online readers in the course of the four years
• note that US newspaper industry digital advertising revenue increased from $3bn to only $3.5bn from 2010 to 2014
• 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. And charge for access to online content. Why? Because it invests the content with value

I think that making newspapers digital was an exceptionally good thing, however the idea of making this content 'free' is essentially the biggest problem. The fact that this generation believe that they are able to get free online content makes the value of news much less as it becomes less than a public good and more like a thing that is taken for granted and advantage of. If the content was to go behind a paywall initially then perhaps we would not take news for granted and traditional newspapers would hold more value, however now the content that we access comes more likely from secondary sources such as social networking sites, making the website itself decline with its readership.