People in the ACT sneeze the most, and have the highest employment participation rate in Australia, the Australian Bureau of Statistics told us this week.
Canberrans also have the highest computer ownership and the highest internet connection in Australia. So it is here that we will see the first signs of any trends. Just as it was here, in the early 1970s, that we saw the pilot trials of credit cards in the form of Bankcard.
Doomsayers in the newspaper industry have been saying that the internet will take over the lot before very long and that newspapers will be no more. The Panglosses (chk spell), on the other hand, have been saying that the internet is just a fad that will pass. (you know, like telephones and fax machines.) The Panglosses have been saying that people will always want their paper. They want to take it to the dunny and the beach. You cannot do that with a computer.
The truth probably lies between the views.
Recently, The Canberra Times internet site reached 100,000 hits in a week. It now does that most weeks. The site is now 30 months old. It took The Canberra Times more than 30 years to go from nothing to 100,000 copies a week in the paper version.
With the paper version we have very little idea which bits of the paper are attracting sales and readers. Sure, we do surveys from time to time, but they do not carry the ruthless precision of the internet “”hit” statistics.
In the past fortnight, for example, we have had a debate in the paper – much of it tongue in cheek — about whether the Letters to the Editor column should be scrapped. Stay calm. It will not be. But I have very little idea of the numbers of readers who look at it. Of more fundamental importance commercially, is the question: how many readers will stop buying The Canberra Times if it is stopped?
Interestingly, about the same time, the internet site was delivering statistics showing that the section devoted to Letters, editorials, Pryor and the opposite opinion page was getting very, very few hits indeed. Now, I always knew that the editorial might rate poorly. With my Mum out of the circulation area, I could count on the sub-editor and the page proof reader. Beyond that, there were no guarantees. But Pryor, for heavens sake. Surely he could not rate so low. Then we changed the internet home page. Instead of lumping those elements under a signpost link saying “”Opinion”, we changed it to “”Your say”. We highlighted Pryor and the Letters and relocated the opposite page opinion material to the news section of the internet site. The result was astounding. We got a 15-fold increase in hits on that section of the internet version of the paper.
I suspect that the internet reader is a tunneller and the newspaper reader is an alluvial panner. The internet reader finds the quartz seam and chases it down ignoring everything else. The newspaper reader scoops the lot up in the pan and looks it all, picking out the odd gem and gold spec here and there amid the clay.
Given the different habits of the two readers, both methods of publication will be attractive. The paper version will present a neat bundle of selected national, international and local news coupled with some entertainment, sport or finance. The newspaper reader will be reliant on (if sometimes critical of) a journalist staff which does the selection. The internet reader will chase a particular piece of information or all information on a particular subject.
This difference will have profound economic consequences. Our internet will deliver to a given real-estate agent a seemingly pitiful 400 hits. The agent’s newspaper advertisement, on the other hand, will be printed 70,000 times and be available to more than double that number of readers. The agent, however, is as likely to be pleased with either result. Because the internet reader is so intensive, the 400 hits delivers to the agent just as many keen buyers as the 70,000 buyers of the print version.
The doomsayers for print could argue that agents will soon give away print because of the huge wastage rate. Why go to the expense of printing to 70,000 when you can hone in an electronic advertisement to 400? Well, the 70,000 printed copies of the advertisement will still deliver a number of non-focused readers. These readers are not like the 400 internet hits who have already decide to sell their existing dwelling and buy elsewhere. They had no intention of doing anything – until they saw the advertisement.
This is even more true of the jobs market. Active job seekers will go for the internet. But there will still be the casual market where a job advertisement could catch the eye of someone who is not an active job-seeker.
I sense a dual market with room for both internet and paper publication for both advertisements and editorial content. The internet will attract the focused searcher who knows precisely what he or she wants. The paper version will attract a reader who wants a general look at the city, national and the world who will remain open to advertisements of all kinds.
If the trends in Canberra are anything to go by, we are seeing a new medium muscling its way in, but it is not muscling anyone else out. The paper version of The Canberra Times has not suffered from the astounding growth of our internet site. Indeed, the two seem to be feeding off each other.