A reputed speaker’s forecast some years ago, perhaps just trying to impress the audience, was that newspapers and tabloids were going to die soon. the speaker even dared to foretell the date for the funeral. If I remember it well, he said that we all would attend to the paper’s funeral by 2030. I can’t remember now who was the diviner, but surely he was a digital freak -there are people like this- who was not able to understand that there is plenty of life beyond Internet.
This guy had no ability to predict the future. He just barked, and very loud, up the wrong tree.
At least this is what shows the research titled “Press: digital versus paper”, which has been carried out by the AIMC among Spanish Internet users. We have already published a short excerpt on this study on the eastwindblog -Spanish edition-
Our digital prophet didn’t know anything of the AIMC’s report, or else he would have kept his mouth quite shut.
Both systems, the digital one and the so-called Gutemgerg Galaxy, are far from excluding each other. The truth is that both are to live together for a long time.
The results of the AIMC study have surprised me a bit. Because who writes this lines was convinced that digital newspapers held a greater slice of the audience cake. But it seems not to be this case.
Traditional newspapers, at least in Spain, are still healthy, leaving aside the ad revenues, this is true. And papers’ total revenues are higher than those of the digital counterparts. This fact do not stop the online papers to keep on advancing, though.
Just some data from the report. A 32% of the Internet users interviewed said that they read the newspapers both in paper and digital on the same day. The proportion rises to the 59% when the time period considered is one month.
The 42.2 % of the respondents assured that the time devoted to read digital newspapers does not reduce the time devoted to the traditional tabloid and papers.
On the other hand a 35% of respondents – all Internet users, don’t forget it-declared they never read online press.
The data from the AIMC report, common sense and the opinion of those who are experts on communication matters just can lead me to one conclusion: there are newspapers and tablets for a while.
However the share of daily digital papers is expected to grow higher than it is now when the use and penetration of the devices needed to read them rise among the Spanish population.
Following the AIMC report, laptops are the most widely employed by the digital readers in Spain (69% of respondents), followed by cell phones (the 16.6%) and tablets (a 4%).
Shall we sing a requiem song for newspapers and tabloids?. We will not for a long time as there’s no funeral in sight. Anyone having just a bit of common sense and some experience in the communications field can see it.
Another question is, if newspapers and tabloids should change the contents taking into account the online offer. How?. Perhaps focusing rather on opinion and analysis than in the bare news facts. At least this is one of the trends to extract from the report recently published by the AIMC.
Image over the headline.- Paperdigifan. © Eastwind.
