final essay

What is the role of print media in the digital age?

With the introduction of modern-day smartphones and tablets, the role of print media has been in question. Print media has played such an important role in everyday life, as it seems the public are unable to walk down a high street without seeing posters and billboards or being given handouts. This in itself has greater effects on the everyday consumer as it is something they will always see on a daily basis and the fact that it is something they get to interact with it means it leaves a longer impact than that of most form of digital media. There is just a certain aspect of print that has a way of invoking feelings within the consumers.  Whether it is the surface gleam from a billboard, to the feel of the type of paper from items such as books and leaflets, each one leaves a lasting impact on the consumer.  However, over the last 10 years, print media has lost ground in this digital media boom, facing competition from the latest technology and leaving many thinking that print may become a thing from the past with Internet, social media and many other forms of digital media community.  With this essay looking into the what role print media has to play in this over digitalised age, we need to get a brief understanding of what forms of print are in use.

Newspapers are an essential source and still the most important medium of understanding and keeping up with the news of the world.  They help their readers with problems and provide fun and amusement with features such as puzzles and cartoon strips.  There is a wide range of newspapers that exist including local, regional or national titles published in daily, evening, weekly or Sunday editions. Each newspaper target different audiences with a mix of content including sports, entertainment, business, fashion and politics. Each one allows advertisers to buy different sizes of advertising space within newspapers, from ads featuring text, photographs, illustrations and graphics in sizes up to a full page or even a double-page spread to grab the readers attention. This is one of the cheaper options for companies to advertise themselves within to the public, as it can just require a one-time payment instead of paying a continuous fee to use certain online advertisement sites.

Where newspapers are created to inform readers of news from all over the world, Magazines have a more direct approach by focusing on a smaller target area such as fashion or technology. Magazines come in a variety of different styles, which can be elegant and modern like the fashion bible Vogue, to the cheap and busy such as OK! Magazine. These offer advertisers extensive choices of readership and frequency. Consumer magazines cover a wide range of interests, including sport, hobbies, fashion, health, current affairs and local topics. Many business and trade magazines provide coverage of specific industries, such as finance or electronics. Others cover cross-industry topics, such as communications or human resources, while others focus on job specific areas, such as publications for executives, marketing professionals or engineers. Publishing frequency is typically weekly, monthly or quarterly. As with newspapers, advertisers can take advertising spaces from classified ads to full-page ads in black and white or colour. 

While newspapers and magazines have a more interactive approach towards its consumers who flick through the pages, Billboards are the advertising way of making people take in information on their everyday routines. Advertising on billboards and posters gives the advertisers the opportunity to reach consumers who are on the move and broadcast information without them noticing at times. Putting posters in retail areas helps advertisers to reach consumers close to the point of purchase. Posters or billboards in train stations, airports or busy town centres have the potential power of reaching much larger groups of consumers at once to convey a message. Advertisers can change the messages on billboards and posters at a frequency of their choice to get across the next message to the mass public. Post and hand outs (such as flyers, mail, leaflets, cards, etc.) gives the advertisers power to direct messages to make them reach smaller target audiences or selected groups to make the advert seem like it is meant for the individual. Direct mail often is, and not restricted, to the form of a letter, brochure or flyer sent via the postal service. Advertisers can compile their own list of prospects and customers for the mailing, or rent a mailing list from a specialist firm.

The print publishing industry is going through a period of intense change brought about in part by the digital revolution of the 21st century. The need for print media in terms of advertising and marketing is still very much needed within our digital lives. Print media has much more of a feeling and interacts with the consumers more with its textures and smells of magazines having an effect on why they are bought. People who buy books and other printed sources have more than one of their senses stimulated. They are entertained and use their imagination to create a familiar comfort which can be read and re-read. Some publications have a hint of vanilla to them and this  has been utilised in publications as the smell is said to invoke consumers to be reminded of their past as the brain links scents with an item, a person, event or even just a certain feeling.  Of course this is not the only reason people buy books. Books make good gifts and people like to collect books to fill their own library. They can even be status symbols to make people believe that the owner is well read.  Printed books, newspapers and other publications utilise this to appeal to the consumer in ways that tablets and eBooks cannot. So much so, companies such as ‘smell of book™’ have utilised the renowned book smell and have incorporated it with the likes of Amazon’s kindles with what they call ‘an aerosol E-Book enhancer’ to make these E-books more like their print counter parts to increase sales.

The article, ‘Paper is back’, sees Frank Catalano look into both digital and print books, and why books are making a comeback. Looking into what differences they have, he states, ‘Multiple studies find that we pitiful humans seem to read differently when given the same text on a screen instead of on a page – and are distracted more easily – so less of what we read sticks.’ He uses the research paper, E-Textbook Effectiveness Studied, from James Madison University to further this point as they have concluded that readers will skim through text on a digital format quickly and repeatedly, while using eye-tracking software shows that printed books are read line-for-line. As a result of that, the content of eBooks will take longer and requires more effort to reach the same level of understanding. Once we start thinking of books, both Formless Content and Definite Content, in the context of new digital reading tools, it becomes clear that we need to start thinking differently about what books are and how they are produced. Instead, the whole process could be reconsidered of how to make a book into the thing it is: the creation, the consumption, and everything that happens around and in between.

Although most people would think that the digital world is the way to move forward to the next step of printed materials, the fact is that the printed form will simply have to adapt and evolve to have a place within this digital age. For instance, at the recent Consumer Technology Association early this year (CES) LG unveiled the bendy reliable OLED screen which can be rolled up as if it was a newspaper with it still being able to continue to show a video image. LG believes that OLED will fundamentally change the future of our home and portable devices as they have announced they will co-develop solutions for ink-jet printed OLEDs, and they will be able to optimize the DuPont's soluble materials for Kateeva's inkjet systems. The companies hope that this collaboration will enable them to offer a simple and highly effective OLED TV printing process. This amazing piece of tech, while only just been unveiled and still in development process, has already got people speculating that it could have the capability to replace newspapers, magazines and possibly the replacement for printed paper forever.

Image of the OLED floor model at CES from Tech Radar

This new product can also be linked in with The Guardian’s article on ‘Digital magazines: how popular are they? in which Ami Sedghi looks at the sales from major journals, which showed that digital editions of the printed journals had significantly lower sales figures than that of the printed editions. Looking at the figures gathered by the Professional Publishers Association (PPA) the overall print circulation and distribution has a significant difference in sales to that of the digital editions, for example Vogues’ sales with its printed magazines at 193,007 compared to their digital editions of a mere 7,601, a huge difference of 186,406 between them. Despite these giant leaps in the circulation of the digital editions of these publications, they still fall short of the gap created by the decline within the printed circulation. In other words, this apparently huge rise in the circulation of digital editions is not enough to offset the bigger decreases created from the printed editions. However, as John Reynolds states, ‘comparing digital sales only figures with the overall circulation totals would paint a very different picture'.  Reporting on the profits of Condé Nast, Josh Halliday wrote: ‘Copies sold on Apple iPads and other tablets are, of course, where the growth is, but those editions still account for a fraction of overall sales and still fail to offset the decline in print. Digital sales of Vogue, for example, have grown by 3,898 copies since the second half of 2012 (3.78% of its total circulation) against a fall of 10,349 print copies at £3.99 apiece’ which goes to show that while print forms are on the decline, it’s still leaving a huge sales milestone that digital media will have a long way to go to catch up. 

One way print media has been trying to keep relevant is by having it linked to its digital media counterpart. For instance the use of QR codes on posters can drive consumer traffic to websites in a quick and effective way. This has been further implemented with Augmented Reality (AR) which creates 3D images when scanned. Statistics have shown that campaigns that combine printed resources with internet advertising yield up to a 25% higher response rate than using internet alone, according to the Direct Marketing Association. Typefaces within Print mediums have much more credibility with the consumer while the internet seem to be lacking this. It just seems that print has a sense of being more trustworthy than that of digital content. In fact many studies have shown that print is still considered more credible with the vast majority of the public than online material. Print is more permanent, retention is better and it has been made to last.  The web is fluid, it changes constantly; information can be rewritten very easily or even deleted by anyone.

There is no doubt that the future will have a much greater digital presence than that of today. The goal the world of print will have to try and achieve is to have the ability to keep up by looking at the differences each form of media have and to stop working to be more like the other with the likes of the digital realm incorporating skeuomorphism within the design. A possible solution is if they work to incorporate each other in each within their mediums to further their own strengths and to work on their weaknesses. Within the book, Print is Dead: Books in our digital age, Jeff Gormez writes “A blank piece of paper and a computer screen when it’s off have something in common: both are empty, devoid of content, ripe with possibility (Gormez 2009, 10). Saying that both have a duty of conveying anything from photos, comedy, tragedy etc., the possibilities are endless".  He also states, ‘but while you can only fit so much onto one piece of paper, a computer screen can be an inexhaustible source of endless information. The computer screen has become a gateway, forever replenishing itself by either scrolling or replacing old information with the newest, latest, pieces of relevant information’ (Gormez 2009, 10) which relates to the challenges that print will have to face. For instance, while a print book is a beautifully simple piece of technology to us, the likes of an electronic book is a more complex technology. An eBook requires a computer, e-Reader or tablet, and a power source to keep the device fully charged and usable. It requires computer access to a website or digital catalogue where files can be downloaded, and an understanding of how to use it. Where books have you physically picking up a page and turning it over, computers get you to click for the info, and tablets have its readers pinch and swipe,  movements that will have to be learned, and vary between all of the different devices and brands. You will need to be able to keep up with the constant development and updating of all of these devices and programs, and understand the value and limitations of each of these different devices, formats and suppliers. With the digital impermanence comes two concepts that are key to the future of the printed media: we can continuously develop a text in real time that erases the preciousness imbued by printing, and authorship becomes in question as this seems to get lost the info gets passed around the digital space. Wikipedia is a fully realized example of how the digital world we live in drastically affects authorship as literally anything can be read, re read, edited uploaded, edited again. This means that the world within the digital space becomes untrustworthy, as you can not fully rely on the source compare to the factual info you can find in books that have to be checked in order for it to make it out into the hands of the public. The quality of the paper, the resolution of the display, the design for the books front covers, and the overall interface used to highlight infomation are all aspects that are all liked together.  A designer would have to create work to fit in either of these methods so if combined, these systems could have the potential to become a united form of media that will shape how information will be received.

In summation, several conclusions can be drawn. Firstly, and most importantly, the term ‘online magazine’ is vague when describing the majority of published material on the Internet. This report has outlined several types of online content, such as PDFs, E-books, Blogs, Websites and RSS feeds – all of which publishers use to communicate.

This report shows that in comparing the readership figures of online media against printed publications, the overwhelming majority lies online. When assessing the advantages and disadvantages between them, a printed publications only lifeline is its portability. With the increasing popularity of e-readers and mobile Internet, its existence, although stable at the moment, is becoming increasingly threatened.

Even with the rising popularity and availability of the Internet, the printed magazine is holding strong. There is still a place for them in today’s society. Local area, fashion, and gossip magazines for example show few signs of change. They recognise and utilise the advantages of an Internet presence as a tool to enhance their printed content and are embracing their technical rivals.. Graphic design magazines in particular show how a combination of assets online and printed work to the benefit of the user and offers a variety of points of views.

Whether the printed publications will eventually be forced to submit to the seemingly limitless possibilities of publishing online is yet to be seen, however what one can be sure of is that the consumer and the technology available to them holds the key to the future of print media.  Emma Munro Smith, editor of Moshi magazine sums up the preference of print when she explained "You might be able to look at a digital game or magazine on an iPad, but you can't cut things out, colour-in, take pen to paper or stick it on your wall." She also states that despite hugely popular online elements to the Moshi world, for her readers, "having their work, letters or username immortalised in print will always be incredibly exciting".

This idea of the permanence of print, particularly among younger generations supposedly reared in the digital age, is something dear to the heart of Gerald Richards, CEO of 826 National, the literacy project set up by novelist and publisher Dave Eggers. "When we watch students with books, there's a very different experience – there's that power of having something physical that they own, particularly when they write and see their name in print: it's always there. With computers, it's gone at the touch of a button."

Times are changing and print must quickly realize that the methods they employed in the past may be obsolete today. Innovation in the news industry will involve changing not only the traditional journalism model, but also incorporating changes into its business, technology, and marketing sectors as well. In the upcoming decade, flexibility and a willingness to experiment with new methods, will likely be the factors that determine whether print media survives or falters.

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