Op-Ed: Traditional News Organizations Losing Out to the Web

This Reddit bookmark made me do a double take. It had to be one of those Golden Oldies that Redditers and Diggers like to dredge up from the dim past every now and then. But no. It's a year's study of 160 news sites, right up to April of this year.

The researchers did a good job, but the results are what Fark would label as "Obvious," and every news junky web surfer would simply respond to with a big yawn and "why bother?" Were the researchers given a mandate? "Please tell us that what we think is happening isn't happening." Or "We need hard numbers before we're going to face reality." Immediacy is the name of the game, and newspapers "no longer have the advantage of being the first to report breaking news online." The demand for the latest news 24/7, is why Digg, Reddit, AOL, Yahoo, Google, and even those pesky bloggers are doing a number on the traditional press. Web site traffic to nationally known newspapers grew by 10% during the year of the study, while traffic to less known papers declined. In the meantime, traffic to sites of national TV networks grew 30%. During the same period, unique monthly visitors to Reddit and Topix went from less than 50,000 to more than 700,000. Even more spectacularly, Digg's unique visitors soared—from under 2 million to more than 50 million. (Someone should make a note about that for the guy who recently pronounced Digg's death throes.) In spite of the discouraging numbers, the Harvard University study had good news for the struggling traditional press, "...news organizations can still prosper on the Web if they can adapt." Really. And they were paid for that. "Because the Web reduces the influence of geography on people's choice of a news source, it inherently favors 'brand names' -- those relatively few news organizations that readily come to mind to Americans everywhere when they go to the Internet for news." So, branding is the solution, even though numerous studies have shown that in most areas of life, brand loyalty is slipping. The group's own findings suggest that those "relatively few news organizations" aren't coming to the minds of "Americans everywhere." Spin is still nothing but spin. More advice: "Their offline reach can also be used to drive traffic to their sites. Most important, they have a product -- the news -- that people want. Ironically, some news organizations do not feature the day's news prominently on their Web sites, forgoing their natural advantage." How does that work, now? Newspapers' offline reach, which is steadily decreasing and which presumably prompted the study, is going to send readers to the web. And those same newspapers whose primary focus is supposedly the news have to be reminded that featuring the news on their websites is a good idea. The race is to the swift, as it has always been. Betting on the survival of these dinosaurs isn't a safe gamble.