More news today on declining newspaper revenues; Mark Evans has details here, and the NYT reports on the story here. Short snippet from the Times:
Daily circulation of American newspapers continued to slide during the six-month period that ended in March, dropping 2.5 percent from the same period a year ago, according to figures released yesterday by the Audit Bureau of Circulations.
Sunday circulation fared even worse, dropping 3.1 percent.
The figures are comparable to the declines of the previous six-month period, which were the steepest in any comparable six-month period in the last 15 years.
“This is just another installment in a long, continuing saga” of the newspaper industry in transition, said Colby Atwood, a newspaper analyst for Borrell Associates.
“Newspaper readers tend to be older and they’re dying and they’re not being replaced by younger people, who tend not to read the papers much,” Mr. Atwood said. Those younger readers are flocking to the Internet and other niche media.
And ditto for other forms of old media, as far as I’m concerned, including radio (yes, I know the latest numbers from Canadian radio are good, but to my mind it’s a very short term development – “these kids today” want their iPods and internet radio, not radio).
And there are more stories from the frontlines today. Warner Music is adopting BitTorrent for video distribution, and while it’s more than fair to wonder whether this is really progress, it’s certainly a development that, like the distribution of video on iTunes, would only a year or two ago have been heresy to propose. Meanwhile, the Sunday Times Magazine has a short love affair with the news newsmaker of the year (decade?), Craig Newmark of Craigslist.
All of which speaks to the profound unrest and disruption of all forms of old media – it’s a rare day that doesn’t see at least a dozen or so new stories about how this industry is being reinvented from the ground up. It’s something we’ll be spending a lot of time on at mesh. Details on the schedule here – come on by and register, there are still (at the time of writing, anyway) a few tickets left.
Update: Mathew covers this issue today with a post that has the best opening line I’ve read in ages: “Media is Jell-O, the Web is the Wall, and You are the Nail”.