The future of print media

Last week we had an intense discussion on the future of print media. We realized that their sales are dropping every year by huge numbers for about a decade now. Clearly, print media has no future and the question is why? And how to fix this problem.

First of all, print media isn’t making any money, because nowadays there are hundreds of possible ways to get informed without paying a cent. Facebook, Spiegel Online, Tagesschau, N24, CNN, BBC – you name it. Why pay for something that is available free elsewhere? And why dealing with all the paper clutter? Now, newspapers are trying to steer against this fatal direction by increasing their online content. But no one doesn’t make any money out of the advertisement they have on their sites. So, they upload a PDF file of their print paper and charge almost the same money, even though they save a lot of money in printing and distributing the product. No surprise that no one is really interested in paying 30 Euros a month for a epaper version of yesterday’s news, if you instead can have the latest news for free. In a world where you have millions and millions of songs right in your pocket for about 9 Euros a month and millions and millions of tv shows and movies for the same price, why pay 3, 4 or 5 times as much for A S I N G L E Paper?

Spiegel Online is trying to change income a little by introducing „Spiegel Plus“. After reading an article you enjoyed, you’ll have to pay about 1€. Still the wrong way. There are million and million of apps for free in the App Store or available for 99 cents. The work for a single app takes hours and hours, even months. Still cheaper than an article with about 500 words.

There is another crucial problem: why pay for only one publisher? Maybe I don’t want to read every day the Süddeutsche or the Guardian. Maybe, I would prefer a broader view of the news landscape.

Nowadays you can individualize every product that you use. Spotify recognizes my taste, so does Netflix. I’m not interested in „The Feuileton“ or Hockey news. I would like to read more about Tech News, international conflicts, soccer, regional politics and American policy. And all of that not only by one publisher, but from a handful for instance. I would pay for an app that can bring me high quality journalism from many publishers and were I can subscribe to certain topics that interest me. And pay 9 Euros, just like Amazon Prime, Netflix, Spotify, Apple Music and so on.

But no one provides a service like this. Because publishers don’t cooperate and sell their own out of date products by themselves, like they do for centuries now.