Australia’s newspapers must be pretty desperate if this is the best they can do.
Their industry body, The Newspaper Works, has issued results of a consumer survey on reader attitudes to newspapers and their websites, seemingly in an attempt to arrest the decline in advertising to the former.
Its main conclusion is to “correct the myth that newspaper websites are cannibalising printed newspapers”. The survey…
… (1) Says people use the different media for different reasons (in fact, those reasons are actually pretty equal for each)…
… (2) Shows the different contexts in which people use the two (but these were already self-evident, weren’t they?)
… (3) And wheels out data to show how newspaper websites are “not cannibalising” their print counterparts (so, why do the lines for print readership and web traffic running in opposite directions?)
The problem with the research is that it’s a conundrum of the obvious and the distorted…
— Most people say they read newspapers for “up-to-date” coverage – but a website is more up-to-date than a newspaper.
— More people said they find unexpectedly interesting items online than in print – conventional wisdom would have said a newspaper (push) is more serendipitous than a website (pull).
— One logical conclusion of regarding websites and newspapers differently would be to refocus newspapers on opinion, and not breaking news – but only marginally more print readers than web users said they use their preferred medium to read comment; that’s not enough to draw a big distinction between each.
Maybe The Newspaper Works’ annoying voiceover man can enlighten us…