It is a little regarded truism that the troubles for the newspaper industry in the United States are not necessarily mirrored elsewhere. Above the border, the Canadian business isn't in the same dire situation, for instance. Nor is it below the border, either, in Mexico.
While there are some European challenges, the New York Times today outlines how the situation in other countries isn't as problematic. NYT focuses on an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report on media in its 31 countries that demonstrates the challenges are rather small compared to those in the U.S. (A Canwest News Service report on it is here.)
Copyright protection is a focal point in some countries, particularly as their media shift more resources to digital, but the overall economic picture isn't bleak.
Which raises a question: Are media in other countries being led around by American prescriptions for problems they do not have? And another question: Are those problems merely delayed? Or: Are they simply the problems of American media?
A combination of three factors make the United States the epicenter of the newspaper industry's problems:
1) Like Canada, Japan, Australia, and the Western European countries, it's technologically advanced. The majority of its citizens have broadband access to cable or satellite TV, access, etc.
2) It has a huge population; the world's third most populous country. And because it is technologically advanced, this means it has an enormous number of general-interest and topical media outlets.
3) The US is arguably the largest or second-largest country in which people read AND speak a common language. More Chinese can read their own language, but speak different (sometimes mutually unintelligible) versions of the Chinese language.
The combination of those three factors mean Americans nowadays have access to a huge choice of domestic media: 100-200 mostly topical cable channels, hundreds of topical magazines, and hundreds of thousands or millions of websites and blogs about domestic topics (or other topics that might interest Americans).
It's difficult, if not impossible, for any general-interest news publication or broadcast to compete with that, to give each reader stories that so articulately match his individual mix of interests. The editors of general-interest news operations instead pick for inclusion those stories that have the greatest common interest (which is why the morning newspaper here in Syracuse had no stories from yesterday afternoon about the World Cup or the Canadian Gran Prix, events which interest me but which no Americans won).
The result is that more and more Americans are dropping general-interest news media (e.g., daily newspapers, news magazines, news broadcasts), using the new technologies available to them, and gravitating to whatever mix of stories they themselves hunt and gather from the vast cornucopia of choices they now have outside of general-interest media.
If you were to plot countries by technology, population, and the monolinguality of their population, you'll find the declines of newspaper penetration by household and the declines in circulation are directly proportional to the combination of those factors.
Vin, that's an interesting correlation. Is there academic research outlining that? And, do you just believe the U.S. is out ahead of what will be a larger trend among such countries?
Kirk, as far as I know, the only academic research being done about it is at my university (which still in the research stages and not yet published). But then there's not much academic research being done anywhere into WHY newspaper circulation and its household penetration has been declining for more than 30 years, just that it is.
I do believe that what's happening to the newspaper industry in the U.S., Canada, Western Europe, etc., will happen elsewhere by the end of this coming decade. More and more developing countries are getting Internet connectivity and the cost of personal computers is radically declining. Plus as mobile (smart) phones, rather than personal computers, become the way most people become the primary way in which people access information, 4.1 billion people rather than 1.7 billion will have such access. The results will vary by language and culture, but don't be surprised to see every greater change during the coming decade than we've seen in the past decade.
RSS Feed
