How confident are publishers, really?
Alan Mutter
http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/
I can't figure out what to make of the strangely inconsistent findings in a pair of new polls measuring the degree of confidence that publishers have in the future of newspapers. Can you? Here is what we know:
On the bullish side of the ledger, a survey released recently by the University of Missouri found that two out of three publishers are "optimistic" about the future of the newspaper business.
On the bearish side, a separate online poll conducted by newspaper broker John Cribb has found consistently over the last four years that only one out of three publishers wants her or his kid to go into the newspaper business.
So, the question is this: If the outlook is so positive, why don't more publishers want their progeny to follow in their footsteps? Comments gratefully accepted below.
As you consider your answer, here are a few more intriguing tidbits from the polls:
In a survey of 458 newspapers representing a third of the industry, the Missouri study found executives at papers with less than 50,000 in circulation to be far more optimistic than those at larger papers.
Of the 109 respondents who said they are "very optimistic" about the future of newspapers, 63% worked at papers of less than 25,000, 20% worked at papers of 25,000 to 50,000 in circulation and only 17% worked at papers of greater than 50,000 in circulation.
The disparity suggests that the newspaper business is healthier in small and medium markets than in metropolitan areas, where costs are higher, ad sales are weaker and digital competition is keener.
With respect to the future of the legacy product, 62% of all respondents to the Missouri survey said they do not envision a day when they no longer will put out print editions and 77% of respondents said their companies had not considered cutting back on the number of days they print papers during the week.
The Missouri poll was the first such effort by the Reynolds Journalism Institute, which intends to repeat the survey in subsequent years to begin tracking publisher confidence.
In a parallel initiative, newspaper broker John Cribb has been measuring the attitudes of publishers over the last four years in an online poll.
Unlike the Missouri poll, which quizzes a systematically selected sample of publishers, the Cribb survey depends on voluntary participation by people whose responses are solicited via email. Although Cribb's methodology is less scientific than the Missouri effort, his poll has produced remarkably consistent results in the last four years, thus meriting our attention in the absence of any other known long-range sentiment surveys.
Starting in 2009 and continuing to this year, Cribb has found that only one publisher out of three wants her or his offspring to go into the newspaper business. At the lowest point (2010), only 31% of publishers thought newspapering would be a good career for their kids. The sentiment in 2012 was the highest in four years, with 36% of respondents saying they would encourage their children to go to work at a newspaper.
In another gauge of confidence, Cribb has been getting consistent responses from publishers over the last four years on the question of whether they would like own another newspaper. On average, only half of them said yes, with the appetite for acqusitions peaking at 52% in 2009, bottoming out at 46% in 2010 and standing at 49% today.
Because Cribb does not ask the same questions that Missouri asks about the long-range outlook for the business, there is no way to see how over-all confidence has trended in the last few years. If the Missouri study goes forward as planned, we will get a better idea of which way the wind is blowing.
Meantime, we're left wondering why more publishers aren't eager to have their kids enter a business they think is so promising. Do they just want to keep all the fun for themselves?
6 COMMENTS:
Martin Langeveld said...
Aren't you (and Mizzou) parsing the stats misleadingly here? You wrote:
"Of the 109 respondents who said they are "very optimistic" about the future of newspapers, 63% worked at papers of less than 25,000, 20% worked at papers of 25,000 to 50,000 in circulation and only 17% worked at papers of greater than 50,000 in circulation."
This is meaningless if we don't know the distribution of the newspaper sizes included in the survey. That 17%, for example, could actually be ALL of the publishers surveyed at 50,000+ newspapers.
Mizzou's release says " In assembling the sample, researchers were careful to ensure it reflected the distribution of circulation size across the industry." But that actual distribution is skewed toward smaller papers - lots of small papers, fewer big ones. I can't find the current stats, but my list of daily newspaper circulations from 2008 shows only about 13% of them were over 50,000. And about 75% were under 25,000. With declining circulation since then, the bottom bracket has probably grown. So 83-20-17 probably doesn't diverge much from the actual distribution, meaning that publishers are more like equally optimistic/pessimistic across the board. We won't know, unless Mizzou opens the kimono.
Will Koenig said...
It could also be that a lot of publishers expect the ship to hold together just long enough for them to retire. Hence there's no need to envision a true digital shift.
Unknown said...
It seems to me that in small markets print is still a competitive advertising medium. Thus small newspapers will hang on longer. The web certainly makes the world a local market, but are smaller markets more likely to still embrace a "buy local" ethic.
Kansan said...
From the survey report: When asked whether the leadership of their companies has considered eliminating a day of publication, as Advance Publications is doing with its New Orleans newspaper and others, 77 percent said "no." Seventeen percent said "yes," and 5 percent replied they already have. Advance announced in May its plans to reduce the New Orleans Times-Picayune's printing frequency from 7 to 3 days a week, while interviewing for the survey was under way.
We're a commercial printer and we print four "daily" products for other markets. Three of them have already dropped at least one day. Reality would seem to be at odds with the survey responses.
Kansan said...
From the survey:
When asked whether the leadership of their companies has considered eliminating a day of publication, as Advance Publications is doing with its New Orleans newspaper and others, 77 percent said "no." Seventeen percent said "yes," and 5 percent replied they already have. Advance announced in May its plans to reduce the New Orleans Times-Picayune's printing frequency from 7 to 3 days a week, while interviewing for the survey was under way.
We're a commercial printer. We print four small "dailies" for other publishers. Three of them already have dropped at least one day of publication since we began printing them. Reality would seem to be at odds with the survey responses.
T.C. Cameron said...
The big takeaway from the study was 46 percent of publishers saying they could envision when their company no longer prints in 10-20 years, while 19 percent said that day will come in less than 10 years. Almost half of the surveyed published envision a print-less media in as few as 10 years. Wow. One in five publishers believe that day will arrive before 2022. That speaks to how little time the print media business has to figure out how to re-create a profitable business model.
"The Industry that Vents Together Stays Together"