What Should I Wear to Print’s Funeral?

Is print dead? Well, I would not say that it is dead, but I would say that it’s on life support and millennials are about to pull the plug.

Think about it, as the generation that would wake up every morning and retrieve the newspaper off of the doorstep fades away, so does print. The generation that is inheriting the buying power is spending their money on the valuable things in life… like Netflix, Hulu, and the latest iPhone. The news is now being found on social media sites.

Many newspapers are reducing their circulation because they can no longer afford to print and distribute daily newspapers. Some newspapers are even trying to keep up with hype and have gone completely digital.

I’m sure that you have seen the online papers that offer a limited number of free article views before they try to sell you an online subscription to view any more of their content. Digital news is what’s hot right now, and I can only imagine that as time passes it will become even more popular. So how can print companies stay in the game? That old phrase “If you can’t beat them, join them” comes to mind. Print companies are going digital, but since that new platform is replacing their newspaper circulation, they have to make money off of it. So that raises the question…are millennials willing to pay for their news?

According to the American Press Institute,

“Fewer than 1 in 5 Millennials regularly use paid access to a digital news app (19 percent), a digital newspaper (15 percent), a digital magazine (15 percent), or an email newsletter (15 percent).”

Surprised? Probably not. Rising generations are pretty much born with a phone in hand, and for many, social media dominates everything. You know what is on social media? Free news. There are few things in this world that appeal more to an average twentysomething, fresh out of college with a degree and student loans in hand, millennial than something being free. Trust me.

You can look at the trending tab on Twitter and be filled in on what the most popular news at the moment is. Most television news stations, including the one that I work for, tweets out news constantly and provide links to a free online article for more information.

According to a recent study done by the Pew Research Center,

“In 2017, two-thirds of U.S. adults get news from social media.”

Free news is so accessible that I can understand why millennials aren’t paying for online subscriptions.

If you don’t want your news mixed with your social media, there’s an app for that. Actually, there are thousands of free news apps available for smartphones and tablets.

I’ve been doing a lot of research on this topic and I just do not see print newspapers making any kind of miraculous comeback. Their glory days are long gone.

There is, however, a silver lining in all of this. While I do not ever see a massive wave of people going back to picking up the daily paper, one form of print (spoiler alert: not journalism) does have its benefits.

Forbes reported on the bright side of print advertising. One of the main things that stuck out to me is that multi-channel approaches are best for reaching a target audience. This may not be the best news for print journalists, but the sales department will like the next few things that I’m about to say. Advertisers know that they need to spread their product across multiple platforms. The more ways that the product is seen, the more memorable it is. While it may be difficult to get the hardcopy in the target audience’s hands, once it is there, the information will stick. How many times have you been walking around a store and vaguely remember a product that you’ve seen in a commercial, online, and probably in a newspaper or magazine? Seeing one product being advertised in multiple ways is important to advertisers, and print is a part of that.

Print journalism is dying for sure, but print advertising is alive and well. The same Forbes article included a study done by TrueImpact that states,

“Direct mail requires 21% less cognitive effort to process than digital media (5.15 vs. 6.37), suggesting that it is both easier to understand and more memorable. Post-exposure memory tests validated what the cognitive load test revealed about direct mail’s memory encoding capabilities. When asked to cite the brand (company name) of an advertisement they had just seen, recall was 70% higher among participants who were exposed to a direct mail piece (75%) than a digital ad (44%).”

All those statistics are pretty scientific, but what that is basically saying is that if you are an advertiser and you want people to remember your advertisement, print is the way to go. Not only are print ads easier to understand without pouring much thought into them, a study by Neilsen Norman Group shows that people generally do not like online advertisements.

While social media is the place that millennials are flocking to, that does not mean that they wanted advertisements to follow. Remember the days when social media apps like Snapchat did not have advertisements? Now, marketers have made their way on to almost every social media platform. Why? Because that’s what people are reading, not newspapers. The only issue here is that even though more people are seeing advertisements that are on social media, more people retain information from a print advertisement.

Let’s be honest, scrolling past and clicking through articles is what people (I) do best. An article by Morning Consult says that people basically dislike online advertisements enough to scroll past them (and maybe even get a little frustrated from seeing the advertisements) but not enough to pay for the social media to get rid of the advertisements.

All of this takes us right back to my original point. Print is not free, and cannot even survive online because of the fact that they need that money from online subscriptions to keep their site up and running. There are so many free online digital news resources that newspaper news directors might as well start looking for a burial plot.

I’ll probably just wear black.