Readers mixed on demise of print

Ronald Edge said he’s been reading InfoWorld for “as long as I can remember.” But the 61-year-old director of information systems for the University of Indiana’s athletic department stopped receiving the print version sometime last year.

Edge is far from alone. As of this issue, InfoWorld’s print subscriber base stands at roughly 180,000, down from a high of 370,000 in December 1999. (As a controlled circulation publication, InfoWorld also made conscious decisions to cut costs by reducing the number of subscribers.) At the same time, traffic to InfoWorld.com has boomed — from nearly 400,000 unique visitors in July 2004 to more than 1.2 million in January 2007.

Nor is InfoWorld alone in trading paper for pixels. In February the oldest continuously published newspaper in the world went entirely digital. Post ock Inrikes Tidningar, or PoIT, founded in 1645 by Queen Christina of Sweden, published its last paper copy in December. Other print publications that have recently gone electronic include Child Magazine, Premiere, and Elle Girl.

The reasons are simple: Readers are increasingly seeking information online, where they can get it faster, more frequently, and in greater depth.

“For a lot of professional reading, it’s more efficient to have the resources online,” said Peggy Watt, an assistant professor of journalism at Western Washington University in Bellingham (and a former senior editor at InfoWorld). “InfoWorld.com can serve its target readership better by giving them the news they need to do their job more quickly. Readers also appreciate having access to archives of reviews and the in-depth stuff InfoWorld has been doing for years.”

A Pew Internet study released in June 2006 confirms the trend. In April 1998 nearly half of all Americans surveyed in the study said they had read a newspaper the day before, while 29 percent said they had read a magazine. By May 2006 those figures had dropped to 40 percent and 24 percent, respectively. During the same period, people who said they’d gone online for information more than doubled, from 25 percent to 53 percent.

“The Net continues to cannibalize other media sources,” writes senior analyst Brian Haven in a September 2006 Forrester Research Report. “Today, more than one-quarter of online consumers say that, since going online, their use of newspapers, magazines, and TV has decreased.”

Thanks to the Web, even magazines that continue to publish in both media have altered their print content to adapt to changing reader expectations, said Greg Mitchell, editor of Editor & Publisher. The bible of the newspaper industry switched from a weekly to a monthly format in January 2004 to devote more resources to its Web presence.

“Readers want shorter, jazzier articles,” Mitchell said. “Time magazine’s redesign is instructive. Things they would have done in the past as a full-page story are now reduced to a time line or a nice picture. It’s like they’re saying they know that readers have already gotten the story online.”

Not every reader is happy with the loss of the print edition, however.

Keith Ujvary, a 53-year-old software architect in British Columbia, said he’ll miss seeing InfoWorld in his mailbox each week. He said he still gets about 60 percent of his information on paper. (His firm also makes software used primarily by pulp and paper mills.)

“Print is a more convenient format — I can read it over breakfast and when traveling,” he said. Online content has too many ads and is harder to read, especially for longer articles, he adds. Many readers echoed those sentiments in response to the blog post announcing the shuttering of InfoWorld’s print edition.

While a powerful trend, the notion that all publications will eventually abandon print is not necessarily inevitable, Mitchell said, noting the negative consumer reaction to some online ads and the ready availability of technology that can block them.

“Most publications are still struggling to make all the resources and energy they’ve poured into the Web really pay off,” Mitchell said. “But a lot has changed in the last couple of years. Publishers used to really moan about how little their investments in the Net have paid off. I hear less moaning now. Many feel like they’ve begun to turn the corner.”