Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

Editor & Publisher this week announced the results of a Newspaper Association of America study which showed that “an average of 59 million people, or 37% of all active Internet users, visited newspaper Web sites each month” during the first quarter of this year. In addition, “During the same period, the overall Internet audience grew 2.7%.” What does this mean to newspapers and their websites? Well, according to John Sturm, CEO of the NAA, “The fact that [the] newspaper Web site audience is growing at almost double the rate of the Internet audience as a whole validates the industry’s investment in digital innovation, and the ongoing attraction consumers have to newspapers online.”

Adds Shawn Riegsecker, CEO of interactive agency Centro, “As [consumers] become more sophisticated in navigating the Web, they are turning to trusted sources of news and information, like newspapers, instead of aggregators or portals. This couldn’t be better for the industry, as [newspapers] control more of this information than any other medium.”

Keeping in mind that this study was conducted by a industry group, and was presented at an industry conference (and really doesn’t mention all the other ways Web users are getting their news besides newspaper websites), this is still just another way of saying that, well, print is dead. After all, newspaper circulation is down, but traffic to newspaper websites is up. The only thing that’s in flux in this scenario is the paper. People still want news; the only thing that’s different is how they’re getting it. And this new study shows that, increasingly, people are going to the Web for their information instead of picking up a physical newspaper. And what this ultimately means is that the “print is dead” debate is really only a problem for printers; news organizations — like traditional publishers — will still exist; it’s really the product that’s going to change, or in some cases, disappear altogether.

NAA Study: Newspaper Web Users Above Average in Many Ways