Tuesday, November 12, 2013

It’s the engagement, stupid: Jim Chisholm says newspapers need to do more to earn attention

Nieman Journalism Lab reporting:


Newspapers’ declining hold on audience attention began long before the web came along, the Scottish newspaper consultant argues, and tablets are one of the best hopes for reclaiming it.
“There is no statistical evidence anywhere that print circulations are declining because of the Internet. I’ve said this many times, and everybody tells me I’m talking complete rubbish,” says Jim Chisholm. “Circulations in the U.S.A. were declining long before anyone invented the word ‘WWW’…The cause of decline in analog consumption is more to do with changes in society than it is to do with the emergence of the Internet.”
That argument — that the decline of newspapers’ fortunes has roots much deeper than the proliferation of screens in our lives — may go against the flow, but Chisholm, a Scottish newspaper consultant, believes it’s important to acknowledge it if newspapers are going to thrive. He presented his ideas at this year’s WAN-IFRA newspaper congress in Bangkok (which Frédéric Filloux deftly summarized), making a case that online content is, at this point, no replacement for print when it comes to reader engagement — and, therefore, advertising revenue.

Shallow engagement

How newspapers are faring online depends on how you look at the numbers, which Chisholm draws from comScore and Nielsen. On one hand, newspapers are among the most popular destinations for Internet users in the United States — 61.5 percent of Americans with an Internet connection visited a newspaper’s website in May, for instance.
But that same data says that Americans often don’t go much further than a newspaper’s homepage and don’t spend much time actually reading its content. Newspapers represented just 1.5 percent of pageviews, 7.9 percent of total visits, and 1.7 percent of the total time that Americans spent online in May, Chisholm says...http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=8672091774752856243#editor/target=post;postID=965910540641669012

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