Paper Tigers in Publishing

You hardly need to turn your head these days to see an example of how paper's time is fading like a Sunday supplement left out in the sun. The Wall Street Journal reported that advertisers are pumping more money than ever into online communications, at the expense of print ads:

Advertisers continue to aggressively increase spending on Internet ads, with close to half of them cutting spending on traditional channels to do so, according to a new survey from Forrester Research Inc.

Nearly 85% of advertisers plan to increase their online ad budgets this year, with the increases averaging 25%, according to a report from the Cambridge, Mass., research company. More than 40% of these advertisers are cutting spending on traditional ad vehicles such as magazines, newspapers, and direct mail to help fund the online increase.

Forrester forecasts that the online-ad market will grow to $26 billion annually by 2010, more than double last year's $12 billion. The report follows recent blowout earnings from Google Inc. and other Internet companies reliant on ads.

Google hosts this blog, and millions of others, on its Blogger service. Google collects nothing for giving me this forum, and somehow the company has made a killing in publishing giving things away. Advertising has been paying Google's bills, just as it always did in the world of daily print.

You can also get an eyeful of one paper after another being busted for faking their circulation numbers. A couple of stories ran in May that covered the coverage of the circulation fakes, both reported by On the Media, the fine journalism radio show produced every week by WNYC in New York.

The first story looked at how a New York area paper, Newsday, let its own news staff do the investigative work and help the paper come clean about sending newsprint to dead people. On the Media followed with a less cooperative tale from Dallas, where the Morning News had to be caught by the independent weekly Dallas Observer at similar hoodwinking. (It's even more fun to listen to the On the Media stories than read those transcripts. The Dallas Morning News segment, part of the public radio riches we all enjoy today, can be heard though your browser at www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/transcripts_051305_paperchace.html)

Of course, if you use Apple's free iTunes software, available for both Windows and Mac, the world of such radio podcasts is now wide open to you. Hearing voices can be very entertaining.

This all matters a great deal at my house, an address where we've produced a paper newsletter for 10 years, mailed faithfully to a couple of thousand readers every month. I've come to believe that change is already upon us, we who have made our careers and livelihoods putting ink on paper. That's the motivation for starting a blog to convey our coverage of the HP 3000 market, rather than rely on a monthly mailing. We still receive a glut of magazine paper in our mailbox here, but it's been a long time since daily or even weekly newsprint came through the door. It's not the money, either; I can't even be bothered to pick up a copy of the free Austin weekly, The Austin Chronicle. The Chronicle is a fine Austin resource, but only when I need a portable version for a day do I reach for the racks which hold tons of newsprint.

Online communication is rising, but I don't expect paper to disappear as a medium. Its time of ascendency is over, though. Declining numbers of book readers, especially those who read literature, is old news. One year ago this week the National Endowment for the Arts reported a steep drop-off in fiction reading. Not the news this aspiring novelist wants to hear, no. But paper doesn't define publishing. Since I started this blog this spring, thousands of words have surfaced that might have remained locked away. An affordable audience though online access is slaying those paper tigers. Storytelling is still popular. We just have to expand our medium of carrying tales.