Story and photos by Andrea Damewood, BSJ '06

With newspaper circulation declining nationwide, many editors and publishers fear their greatest competition is not from television or radio stations, but from their own Web sites.

For the first time, the Belden Associates’ “Sales and Site Survey” has shown that newspapers may be harming their own business by making content available online. Three panel members gathered September 23 in Fisk Hall to discuss the cannibalization of print news by their online counterparts as part of the continuing “Brown Bag” lunch lecture series.

"Publishers, editors and circulators are scared,” said Steve Duke, project manager for the Media Management Center’s Readership Institute, which focuses on the decline in newspaper readership. “[They] believe that their site is cannibalizing their product.”

However, Duke and his fellow panelists, Owen Youngman, the Chicago Tribune’s vice president of new products, and Rich Gordon, chair of Medill’s new media program, said that the issue was not as black and white as one media platform replacing one another.

Many media analysts blame the downward trend in circulation on the availability of free content on the Web, Gordon noted, but that deterioration is due to an overall change in the way people are obtaining their news. Current solutions like charging for online access will provide mixed results at best, he said. “I have doubts that any one newspaper can put a finger in the dike and stop the flood.”

Gordon said the good news from the Belden survey, administered on the Web pages of five newspapers including the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Rocky Mountain News, Denver Post, Dayton Daily News and Longview (TX) News-Journal, is that 90 percent of consumers have not changed their reading habits. But, of the 10 percent of consumers that have modified their behavior, more readers have cancelled their subscriptions (six percent) than started new ones (four percent).

Youngman pointed out that newspaper circulation has dropped since World War II. He paralleled the effect of online news on print news to the impact television had on radio in the late 1940s. “The newspaper industry would be better served by thinking of all these things as filling particular needs at particular times,” he said.

The group also touched upon other recent competition to traditional newspapers, such as the Chicago Tribune’s RedEye tabloid, and making news available on a customer’s cell phone. Youngman said that Web sites, cell phones and RedEye are all based upon the idea of building a readership habit.

“It’s not just about the content,” Youngman said. “It’s about the relationship with the reader and what we do with it. I don’t see the newspaper going away, but I have a very broad definition of a newspaper.”