Concerned Citizens

This past week Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the publisher and chairman of the NY Times, told a group of attendees at the International Newsroom Summit that “We will stop printing the New York Times sometime in the future, date TBD.” For some time now we’ve known that the Times would be changing its revenue model to a paywall to help support and sustain an all digital edition. The question back then was whether Sulzberger would continue the print edition that blankets the nation and world. I guess we now have our answer and would definitely signal the new course of media to an all digital model.

With the NY Times now supporting digital editions on the PC, the Kindle, the iPhone and iTouch, and now the iPad, it’s no wonder they are contemplating shutting down the expensive and wasteful print operation and work towards a more sustainable and cheaper model such as digital. Looking at their digital operation one can see it is where the Times is investing the most amount of time and effort. Today the NY Times website is one of the richest media sites on the Internet. With the inclusion and acquisition of a variety of blogs and with their videos and podcasts, the Times leads the industry in setting a standard for how content should be delivered.

It’s good that the Times has picked a date sometime in the future to make the transition. This will give them time to explore methods for funding this new digital model without the lucrative print advertising revenue to prop up the digital arm. Up until this point news publishers found it very hard to make their digital operations sustainable in terms of revenue. In many cases the digital division always seemed to be more of an expense than a revenue generator.

However, with the advent of new delivery mechanisms such as tablets, e-readers, and smartphones news publishers are finding new methods to publish content along with some advertising opportunities. As consumers become more accepting of digital only versions this model will continue to shift. Consumers will become more open to paywall kind of structures, opting for sustaining subscriptions or single issue purchase for digital only content.

Even our own Express-News has started to explore a new content delivery model by opting for “web first” publishing over an old model where the web always came last in the publishing space. Today I often find stories published to the web earlier than they show up in print. This will help draw more readers to the digital version of the paper and open the door for a possible future paywall approach for delivery. In this migration they may follow the path put forth by the Detroit Free Press which now publishes print editions only 3 days a week.

I have been a long-time advocate of digital only editions of books, magazines and newspapers. Currently I subscribe to all my newspapers digitally, get my books in digital form only, and have been a digital subscriber to both the NY Times and the Express-News. With the E-N I have had to opt for a print on the weekends model to get the most cost effective subscription. This allows the E-N to push print advertising to my doorstep and recover advertising dollars that would have been lost in a digital only version. In other words, print advertising is helping subsidize my news subscription.

More and more colleges, universities and now secondary schools are beginning to explore using digital textbooks as an option for delivering educational material. With devices becoming more robust and affordable education will continue to embrace this revolution in publishing that can hopefully draw down costs and provide an easier way to publish the most recent information to students.

Recently UTSA opened the first all digital library in the nation for their Engineering Department. It will house 45,000 e-book titles and 18,000 e-journal subscriptions. As the article states “UTSA is exploring ways to take the bookless concept even further. In the next few months, UTSA will start providing pre-loaded collections of eBooks on devices like the iPad or the Kindle for students to check out and take home.”

Will print completely disappear in the future? Probably not. However, I feel you will soon begin to see a world where publications and writings will appears in digital form first and print afterwards. Cost models will continue to favor digital as the costs of publication are really just for infrastructure and not real materials. Environmentally digital only is the best option as it avoids the harvesting of trees and the expensive consumption of resources to produce, print, package and ship printed material.

In the end the key thing to remember is that content is still king. There will still need to be good writers, editors, and publishers. That process will not change. So for those publications who are getting rid of their best writers and editors I think you can start to see the writing on the wall of their eventual fate.