Newspaper Nine Queensland
(Image: Unsplash/Bank Phrom)

The latest deep dive into our journalism habits suggests printed media is unlikely to long survive COVID-19. The Pollyanna take? Print media’s loss is opening up space for a more interesting, more diverse journalistic ecosystem that better meets the needs of our communities.

The University of Canberra’s Digital News Report: Australia 2021, released yesterday as part of the Reuters Institute global survey, shows just one in five Australians have read news in a printed newspaper or magazine in the past week — about half as many as just five years ago.

Print media is the primary source of news for just 4% of Australians — most of them over 75 — and the average reader is significantly to the political right of print’s digital sibling.

The economics of old media made organisations look for mass audiences clustered around the political centre. Still true: commercial television and the major News Corp papers sit to the right of centre, Nine mastheads and ABC TV to the left. ABC Radio hits the statistical centre. (Remember, this is the audience, not necessarily the journalism.)

Audiences for new media are more diverse and more scattered across the political spectrum.

The post-print future is already happening in local news. As regional and community print titles closed last year (and then largely consolidated into state-based tabloids), new digital (small) players have sprung up, with more local news and more focus on community. Take, for example, In the Cove, reporting out of Sydney’s Lane Cove.

At the city level, the once-mighty press is looking like a cross between a legacy service to an aging audience and brand promotion for the digital service. Take out hardy media philanthropists like Harvey Norman and Clive Palmer (and the racing industry) and there’s precious little advertising left to justify keeping it alive.

In Australia’s offline news world, print has been replaced by television, where the leader — in trust, in audience, in influence — is the ABC. It’s a closer race on the internet, although there it’s the generic (and free) brands — such as news.com.au and nine.com.au — rather than the paywalled mastheads that have entrenched the lead the ABC has seized during events like the 2019-20 bushfire season.

The Digital News Report suggests that the pool for digital subscriptions may be close to soaked up. About 13% of Australians have made some financial contribution to digital news in the past 12 months. (That includes you, Crikey subscriber!) That’s the same number as last year, although up 3% points since 2016. It’s behind the 17% global average, and the 21% in the US market. (Blame public broadcasting? The UK is even lower at 8%.)

Most payments are for subscriptions (including transitional print-digital bundles). Others are donations, as online news organisations like The Conversation follow The Guardian’s lead of appealing for donations to keep journalism public.

The collapse of the centuries-long print habit is no surprise, but it has come remarkably quickly.

It’s less than a decade since Australia’s major publishers went “digital first”, prioritising online audiences rather than holding its best stories for the morning print edition. It’s just five years since traditional media acknowledged that the advertising-supported free news model couldn’t work online.

Now COVID-19 has accelerated the breaking point, as the print product has vanished from the shared space of cafes, public transport and work rooms. How close is print to being irremediably non-viable? Looks like somewhere between “very close” and “there already”.

The most recent financial figures from Nine (less opaque than the quarterly News Corp figures) say the digital revenues of its once-was-Fairfax arm are now greater than its print revenues. (That said, Nine’s digital arm has been added to the mix.)

But with the multi-million-dollar boost from big tech under the news media bargaining code, the Fairfax remnant in Nine will now have most of its revenues coming from digital while most of its costs are spent printing for an aging audience, largely spurned by advertisers.

As Charles Dickens’ Mr Micawber would say: “Result, misery.”