“ALL NEWSPAPERS GONE BY 2015, TV NEWS TO FOLLOW”
By Michael Morin

“Stop the Presses” once was a cry to stop everything in order change the front-page story with late breaking news. But it now signals that the end is near for newspapers as we know them, and for that matter, for TV news, too.

This is according to Esther Thorson, Acting Dean, Missouri School of Journalism and Professor of Strategic Communications. She is an acknowledged authority on the industry and her research has determined that consumers are quickly abandoning traditional sources for news and relying heavily on the Internet. She feels that by 2015 traditional news media, as we know it, will be gone as each generation continues the trend towards reading less newspaper. More and more, the Internet is replacing both newspaper and TV news, especially when it comes to immediacy and diversity of news coverage.

Dr. Thorson made these comments as one of the key speakers during the Conference of Academics and Businesses on Leveraging Online Media and Online Marketing, held in Palms Springs, California February 6-8, 2008. The conference was hosted by The Yaffe Center for Persuasive Communications along with the Sloan Center for Internet Retailing and the Marketing Science Institute.

To explain her conclusions, she talked about the four basic communication needs: the need to be connected, the search for information, the desire for entertainment, and shopping/consuming. Changes in technology have driven major changes in behavior and lifestyle that pose serious challenges to traditional advertising and media practices. More often these days, the four communication needs are being met by the non-traditional method - the Internet.

The change in how we satisfy our four communication needs is seriously impacting revenue for both newspapers and TV news programming. The Internet is providing a way for people to obtain news on an immediate basis. It lets them research their needs, making traditional print circulars nearly obsolete. It allows them to talk to their friends and make new friends. Plus, it provides unlimited information on demand. This has led to a fundamental change in audience expectations for advertising and a rejection of the centralized, one-to-many concept of advertising.

While these dire predictions may or may not happen as fast as Dr. Thorson has outlined, the trends are there and they can’t be ignored. Smart marketers recognizing this shift in media habits would do well to test the various options the web provides such as keyword selection, search engine optimization, the quality of their web site presentation and other, new ways of disseminating messages.

This was just one of the perspectives offered by a wide range of conference speakers from both academia and business. The speakers focused on opportunities we have and roles we can take for finding new ways to communicate with and market to consumers, given the rapidly increasing usage of online media, online communities, and online retailing.

The Yaffe Center for Persuasive Communications at the University of Michigan is Co-Directed by S.S. Kresge Professor of Marketing Rajeev Batra and Tim O’Day, Marketing Consultant at Morgan Stanley. The Center focuses on the research and teaching of new media in an interdisciplinary environment.

The Sloan Center for Internet Retailing at the University of California, Riverside is lead by Professors Donna Hoffman and Tom Novak and is the world’s leading research center dedicated to improving the effectiveness of online retailing.

Michael Morin, Executive Vice President, The Yaffe Group, attended the conference as the head of Yaffe’s direct marketing practice.