06/22/2018

Print & Digital: Living Happily Together?

Source: D. Eadward Tree, Publishing Executive, June 15, 2018

Both sides were wrong.

“In three years, none of this will be in print,” a senior publishing executive told me, six years ago, about two magazines that are still profitable and still in print. Mr. Print Is Dead thought magazine publishing would soon be all about apps and the web. (You see, kids, back then there was this thing called the iPad that ... oh, never mind.)

At the same time, those in the Not Dead Yet camp complained that the rush to post free content on the web was “turning print dollars into digital dimes.” It wasn’t sustainable in the long run, they pontificated.

Yeah, well, if predictions actually came true we’d all have flying cars by now. Print and digital were supposed to be adversaries but instead have developed a symbiotic (some would say co-dependent) relationship, as indicated by these recent developments:

• Unique visitors to major “digital-native” news sites were down 5% in the fourth Quarter of 2017 versus the previous year, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of comScore statistics. Pew’s definition of “news” is rather broad, encompassing the likes of Bleacher Report, Breitbart, Business Insider, and Buzzfeed.
• Also during Q4, the web sites of MPA members, which represent a broad cross-section of major U.S. consumer “magazine-media” titles, experienced a 5% increase in unique visitors, according to the MPA’s compilation of comScore statistics. Wait! What was the Digital Only crowd saying about print being a ball and chain that makes legacy publishers too slow to adapt to the web? As consumers grow increasingly disenchanted with the quality and veracity of what they read online, they are turning more to trusted online sources -- and that tends to mean sites that are associated with legacy media.

Read more about the "symbiotic" relationship in the full article.