A VISION OF NEWSPAPERS - 2020 C.E.
The World Association of Newspapers (WAN), recently asked Gordon Borrell to offer his vision of newspapers in 2020. Here is an excerpt of that essay.
Looking 13 years into the future with any hope for accuracy is a tricky thing. I’m wondering what futurists might have told us about today, 13 years ago. In 1994, would they have predicted the overwhelming rise of the Internet and the success of eBay, Google and Yahoo – none of which existed at the time? Would they have anticipated the precipitous decline for North American and European newspapers, even though they were experiencing strong growth in the mid-1990s?
To look forward to 2020, it’s best to look back.
First, daily newspapers as we know them have been around for nearly four centuries, so it’s hard to imagine – even in this age of the digital media – that readers will abandon them in 13 short years. The fact is, newspaper circulation worldwide has been increasing at an impressive rate. There are 450 billion newspapers in circulation every single day, with one-third of all adults reading a newspaper. The number of newspapers in circulation has been increasing steadily for centuries.
In the strongest market, the U.S., the picture is vastly different. Circulation has been declining for 20 years and slipped below the magical point of “critical mass” – or half of the U.S. households – two years ago. Forty years ago, 81 percent of all households got a newspaper. Today, it’s 48%. Things look bad.
Between now and 2020 I see a transformation of newspapers. They will move from the 100-year-old model of paid circulation and black-and-white news and advertising to a mostly “free” distribution model with lots of color and graphics. In essence, they will need to differentiate themselves by become less like newspapers and more like local magazines.