Poynter’s Bill Mitchell previews a new study that says printing and distribution account for “almost half of expenses” at many newspapers, but “few — if any — publishers have a game plan or timeline for transitioning a majority of their print readers to online delivery.” That’s so, they argue, “even though several recent surveys of media usage indicate that readers are re-organizing their lives around the new technology — and leaving print behind.”
The study is by “two leading analysts of media economics,” Penelope Muse Abernathy, who holds the Knight Chair in Digital Media Economics and Journalism at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina, and Richard Foster, a former McKinsey & Company executive who is a now senior faculty fellow at the School of Management at Yale.
They urge traditional news organizations to pursue a three-pronged survival strategy over the next five years:
- Shedding legacy costs as quickly as possible.
- Re-creating community online — in an attempt to regain pricing leverage.
- Building new online advertising revenue streams to replace the loss of traditional print categories.
Tags: Online