What's killing print?

The popular notion is that the internet is killing print. I beg to differ.

Sure, the internet has undoubtedly become de facto source of information for many of us, but it was not the internet that started the trend to kill print. What really began to kill print off was the growing disparity between income and cost of living.

To illustrate this trend, I compiled the Consumer Price Index (CPI) published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics with Per Capita Income published by the Census Bureau, and placed them together in the chart below. Stacking them together (even though one is an index and the other is measured in fixed 2008 dollars), you can see how per capita income has not kept up with prices, and the gap has continued through up and down economic cycles.

I propose that, because costs have exceeded income growth, Americans have been forced to choose between paying for print or for other goods and services. With the advent of the internet and the acceleration of the migration of media to the internet, most people have chosen to cut their subscriptions to print in order to maintain their connectivity to the internet. You might still say that this is all semantics - since ultimately the internet is involved with print's decline - but understanding the root of the problem helps to discern that raising prices for subscriptions and charging for access of content online simply won't work. Certainly by raising prices and charging for content there will be a temporary increase in print income, but so long as that gap between the CPI and per capita income exists, people will have to continue to choose the cheapest option, and that cheapest option.

Not even e-print will make up for the loss of income from newsprint. I had once thought that diversity was the answer, but if you're charging the same amount (or more) for that e-print edition, it's still a losing proposition as you won't be attracting new eyes, but instead, you're only asking existing paying customers to migrate from print to e-print. How do I know this? Because of the phenomenon of people dropping their landlines for cell-only service; because of the migration of people choosing free streaming music or single MP3 purchases instead of CDs; because of the demise of Blockbuster and DVD sales while Netflix thrives. When you have more money than you know what to do with, these duplicate and overlapping services have little impact, but for the rest of us, we tend to cut one off - the least flexible and useful.

I have had ideas about how to solve the print problem, but that's for another post and another day.