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written by Ngigi wa Kamau , September 10, 2008

The much heralded demise of traditional print media has not occurred. Has traditional print been challenged, yes! Is it dead...absolutely not.

Advertising still plays a major role in keeping traditional print media alive. Nonetheless, you capture an essential aspect of what digital media offers compared to traditional print/electronic mediums - immediacy.

However, I would argue that this is a complementary aspect in the quest for information rather than a purely competing aspect. The need for second by second updates may be essential for journalists...but it is really difficult to see the value of Twitter & similar as it happens channels when immediate information is not of the essence.

What digital media have done is to expand the reach of facts & diverse opinions ensuring a more robust & informed public discourse. We are no longer captives to large media houses in our quest for info. In this sense, digital media democratizes information, and should, hopefully, raise media standards.

Ngigi

Well well let's get the categories right .
written by pndiangui , September 13, 2008

First of all I agree with Victor that media houses have seen the newspaper circulation revenues drop. We have also seen a growing market for online advertising market. I can't quote the figures from the top of my head but yes internet-based (including mobile) has been expanding at more than 20% P.A in the last couple of years , these figures being representative of where broadband penetration is high.
The way I see the fundamentals of Newspaper's demise is the fragmentation of the pipe; The News/media delivery pipes. In the past, the channels have been very few probally even almost monopolised through licenses and high CAPEX and OPEX required in the production and distribution of paper-based news products. It might be said so for both Television and Radio especially during the heydays of high Media regulatory by the States where licenses involved a significant CAPEX for both start-ups or growing firms entering new markets. What we have now is an open pipe with low cost of producing and distributing news or even other media products, the Internet pipe and the World wide web delivery platform. I wouldn't say the same is true of the Cellular-based accessed Mobile content but that is set to change with the advent of mobile comunications based on wifi and Wimax , which again revelas the power of the Internet Protocol pipe.

Thus the transformation is Technologically led as it happened during the Print media technology transformation in early 19th century but the impact is going to be far reaching even on the way interactions happen within a Society. During this times, faster and automated printing rooms led to the growing Magazines, newspaper and books.

Ofcourse some media houses will face closure as the business models become stale. I have not a single doubt about this. Advertisers will continue questioning the ROI of any advertising channel that claims to capture audiences and even demand some evidence.

What this fragmentation has done is that the technology has just helped to deliver services to media consumers who were being rumped together by newspaper as 'one audience' who requires the same set of information.

Audiences have shown that they consume a portfolio of media products depending on their information needs that serve the jobs they need to get done. The ability to deliver customized media products is what the low cost internet and www has enabled. That's the premise of the prolification of blogs and what we are now calling media production and delivery democracy.

For newspapers if they adopted this paradigm they can easily survive the onslaught from the disuptive start-ups. If they understand how to develop and support media portfolios of media delivery platforms based on target audiences and where business models that support the value delivery may duffer they can survive the onslaught. For instance Washington post has seen itself enter in online education with great success; conceptualizing media as an educator or key knowledge delivery medium is something major newspapers have not been good at , yet literacy in a society can be correlated with newspaper circulations. Classfieds like real-estate or general advertising and e-commerce transactions enabling are areas that the newspapers have started to get good at.

Digital media doesnt however qualify the death of the print... am on Ngigi on this point and especially on well thought out solutions like the morning or evening Train short snippets free newspapers. Where the job to be done by the audiences is very clear and is in tandem with the prevailing circumstances. But any media outlet trying to rump its audiences into one category, whether moving its content online will find its death. The business model and the products on offer have to change.

Dead? Not yet but mortally wounded yes.
written by sufuri , October 22, 2009

Technology is generational. Majority of the current crop of newspapers readers will continue trusting newspapers until the web savvy generation come around as the dominant population. I dont see myself as a future PS asking my secretary to buy all newspapers every morning for me to read!

I used to buy the nation daily.These days I buy when I am traveling only because I cant read news on my Iphone as much as I would like to. When mobile technology matures, I will not buy it.

As for classified information such as real estate, the same applies.It is easy to see a house online, all the pictures etc something you can not see on a single picture on a newspaper.

Even those free newspapers we get on London underground will cease to appeal when you have your blackberry in your hands for the short trip home where with Apple wireless home cinema, i can sit down and open my popular web site 3 meters away from the screen and read news with my remote.I am already doing that with my mac mini and a 22 inch samsung monitor at high resolution.

Digital Divide
written by Nekessa , October 23, 2009

For as long as internet penetration is still low in Kenya, and in many parts of the world, newspapers and radios will continue to grow. The challenge that this presents for us in the internet and mobile technology world is how to get news and information to these communities in ways that they can consume, affordably. Just today, I read an article showing that the mobile phone industry has grown by 550% on the continent: how can we harness this information to get news (via mobile radio? etc) to people? At little or no cost? That is the challenge the media in Kenya faces.

Definitions
written by DMbure , October 28, 2009

Perhaps what we may not be looking at is the definition of news in the context of relevance. An example would be that, as Ngigi wa Kamau has mentioned, real time updates are not suited for everyone. I will venture to say that very few of us consume news on a minute by minute basis, in a piecemeal manner, we all, or more specifically, some of us, consume news in terms of relevance and aggregation. This is mainly because there is a plethora of news, relevant, irrelevant and repetitive on the internet and hence the ease of accessing that digital content becomes circumvented. My prediction is that in the same way books will not be swallowed up by e-books is the same way news papers will not be completely eliminated, what will happen is that the print media vendors will migrate some of their news online yet find a way of boomeranging the user back to print media in some way or another. I'm no oracle so the jury is still out on how they may achieve this but it seems to me to be the natural progression of cyclical evolution. An example is how movies evolved from cinemas, to video tapes, to dvds and now back to cinemas; the resilience of the industry is in it's capacity to create new needs every time the previous need becomes redundant.