The newspaper is dead and news in the future will be consumed in little digital packets of 60 words or tweets of 280 characters. This is a popular myth based on surveys of upper class youth who have stopped reading newspapers, disconnected their Tata Sky connections, and largely rely on Netflix or Amazon Prime for their media consumption.
The truth is fortunately quite the opposite. The recently released data by the Indian Readership Survey (IRS) for first quarter of the calendar year 2019 shows that India continues to buck the international trend of a contracting print media.
As many as 425 million people read a daily newspaper in Q1 of 2019 compared to 407 million in 2017, a rise of 18 million or a healthy growth of 4.42 per cent over one year. As a percentage of the population, this means 39 per cent (53 per cent in urban areas) of the people are consuming news through a newspaper.
Magazine readership, long thought to be dead, has actually grown since 2017 by 9 million, up to 87 million from 78 million. Even English newspapers, for which readership had earlier declined, have scored a rise between 5 and 20 per cent.
CARNAGE IN THE WEST
These figures are amazing, especially when pitted against the carnage in western markets. Print, and news consumption in general, began dropping from the mid-1990s.In the United States, weekday print circulation (not readership) has shrunk from 60 million in 1994 to 35 million combined print and digital circulation in 2018. Advertising revenue too has fallen drastically from $65 billion in 2000 to around $19 billion in 2016, while newsroom employment fell nearly 40 per cent between 1994 and 2014.
In Britain, newspapers have declined in circulation steadily by 6 to 10 per cent annually since 2005, and there are no less than 200 local and regional titles that have disappeared or stopped publication over this period. The disappearing print media has caused such concern that Prime Minister Theresa May described it as a “danger to democracy”.
This does not mean that people in these western markets are turning to the digital editions of newspapers. The trend is in fact towards a decline in news consumption in general and a preference for abbreviated news content such as Twitter or mobile news alerts.Pew Research showed that in Q4 of 2017, for the top 50 US daily newspapers, there was an average of 11.5 million monthly unique visitors, less than the 11.7 million for 2016. This was the first year of decline compared to an increase of 18 per cent in 2015 and 21 per cent in 2016.
AD REVENUES FLAT
In India, though print media has performed well, the concern is ad revenue continues to stagnate. According to Magna Global, a division of media agency group IPG Mediabrands, print media ad revenue grew 5.6 per cent in 2018 to Rs 22,121.9 crore on the back of elections in six states; and the agency predicts that the current Lok Sabha elections, and the greater reliability of print media in an age of fake news, will take it up to Rs 22,423.3 crore in 2019.
However, considering a four-month long election season, preceded by a near-war with Pakistan, a growth of just 1.4 per cent in ad revenue is not sensational.Unfortunately, over the last decade, print media’s share in the overall advertising spends has declined from about 30 per cent to about 18 per cent. This is hurting as the cover price of newspapers and magazines contribute nominally, while advertising makes up 90 per cent of the revenue.
There are various reasons for this scenario. Advertising on digital platforms has grown rapidly to about Rs 15,000 crore a year. There’s also the glitz and glamour of broadcasting and OTT platforms that print cannot match.
The biggest problem has been the ever-changing currency – How do advertisers gauge the reach of print? Over the years, the currency changed from ABC circulation figures to readership figures; and then there was competition between IRS and National Readership Survey (NRS), with the latter collapsing.
Now with IRS establishing itself with a steady sample size of 2.5 lakh, the next step would be to gauge ‘readership’ for both print and online together as is done in western markets. As it is, IRS data shows that the online readership for newspapers is 12 percent in towns and cities with population of 50 lakh and above.
If substantial investments are made in news gathering and technology for real-time delivery of news by print media groups, we can still envisage quite a few years of robust growth.