Forget the print edition. For her daily dose of current events,
The New York Times Online is Rachel Landis’ homepage.
In a technological age, Landis, a Jewish campus service core
fellow at the Yitzhak Rabin Hillel Center for Jewish Life at UCLA,
prefers online sources for international and national news
coverage.
“I don’t have time to go through a whole printed
paper. What I like about digital papers is it highlights the
important events that are happening,” she said.
Landis is part of a larger trend of people reading news online
rather than in print. The number of visitors to newspaper Web sites
hit an all-time high in November 2005, according to a new report by
Nielsen/NetRatings for the Newspaper Association of America.
While Internet usage has been increasing, newspapers across the
country have seen a decline in print readership.
The NAA found that the circulation for newspapers has been
decreasing steadily in the past two decades, with a national
circulation of 62.7 million in 1988 to about 54.6 million in
2004.
Online advertising and classifieds, in addition to digital news
coverage, has hurt print media’s revenues, said
communications professor Tim Groeling.
“It used to be, if you were selling a car, you would have
to go to a newspaper. But now, most people will go to Cars.com and
get an ad that’s considerably cheaper and get more people to
look at it,” Groeling said.
He added that tracking the effectiveness of advertisements is
easier online than in print, which is an appeal for advertisers to
use a digital medium.
Groeling said the Daily Bruin’s financial losses ““
amounting to a $654,000 decline in revenue since 2001 ““
epitomizes the direction print media is headed.
Other college newspapers have faced similar budget cuts and
revenue losses.
In its 2003 income tax forms, The Stanford Daily reported a
revenue reduction ““ from $1,598,807 in 1999 to $915,989 in
2002.
Though no sections have been entirely eliminated due to budget
cuts, the Stanford Daily has faced a tightening of article content,
said business manager Brendan Marten.
“In early 2000, there were things that were more fixable,
like cutting down the cost of bonuses or student activities and
avoid higher printing costs and more ad contents,” Marten
said. “But as things got more serious, we had to basically
try to trim everything, including our paper.”
With this rise of digital media, Groeling said newspapers will
have to change their consumption pattern in order to compete with
other online sources.
“To stay running, newspapers (need to) have something that
can make their physical delivery pay off for them, like how our
local newspapers include high quality photos or merchandise
coupons, which is harder to get online,” he said.
Groeling said several forms of print journalism could disappear
altogether.
“There are the national papers that do well covering
national news and the local papers that do a good job covering
local news. But what about the papers in between? They could
possibly disappear to online news,” he said.
Landis said what scares her is that journalism could lose its
credibility if it is primarily online.
“Because of online sources, reporters can write about
anything they want online, but it creates problems because you
never know who you can trust as reliable,” Landis said.
The loss of revenue could compromise what articles are present
in a newspaper, Groeling said.
“Since newspapers have high profit margins, they could
either lower revenue intake or cut the news coverage by sending
fewer people to cover events and relying more on wire
stories,” Groeling said.
But more newspapers seem to be taking the second route.
Because of the costs, Groeling noticed that newspapers have been
sending less journalists overseas to cover the war, not giving
readers adequate news coverage.
“There (is) news that (is) important that people might not
know about because of the cost,” Groeling said.