A declining audience

The Shorenstein Center at Harvard has published a study of news on the Internet, and the news isn't good for newspapers like the Enquirer. The study is here, and it's a PDF file. Here's the last two paragraphs of the executive summary:

Our evidence suggests that the Internet is redistributing the news audience in a way that is pressuring some traditional news organizations. Product substitution through the Web is particularly threatening to the print media, whose initial advantage as a “first mover” has all but disappeared. The Internet is also a larger threat to local news organizations than to those that are nationally known. Because the Web reduces the influence of geography on people’s choice of a news source, it inherently favors “brand names”—those relatively few news organizations that readily come to mind to Americans everywhere when they go to the Internet for news.

Although the sites of nontraditional news organizations are a threat to traditional news organizations, the latter have strengths they can leverage on the Web. Local news organizations are “brand names” within their communities, which can be used to their advantage. Their offline reach can also be used to drive traffic to their sites. Most important, they have a product—the news—that people want. Ironically, some news organizations do not feature the day’s news prominently on their websites, forgoing their natural advantage.

The review of newspaper web site traffic shows that overall, traffic growth is basically flatlining. The big "brand name" newspaper web sites like the Times, the Post and USA Today are gaining traffic. Traffic at sites of medium-sized newspapers is shrinking, however, and shrinking fast. The Enquirer was not included in the survey. Gaining traffic are search engine news sites (like Yahoo and Google), bloggers, "aggregators with attitude" and TV and radio sites.

So, newspapers are losing their grip.

The largest threat posed by the Internet to traditional news organizations, however, is the ease with which imaginative or well positioned players from outside the news system can use news to attract an audience. Just as the television networks made their mark as entertainment media before making a serious and successful entry into news in the early 1960s, yahoo.com, aol.com, and other search engines and service providers are making a serious and successful foray into news. And if such sites came in through the side door, others have come in through the front door, offering users a form of news that traditional media were not providing. Sites driven by partisanship, by users, and by interactivity are now a significant part of Internet-based news and are likely to grow in audience and influence.

Newspapers are hampered by big bureaucracies and tight budgets. The new players are more nimble, and, in the case of Google, rich. The Enquirer is undermanned in this fight, and as you can see from this list, it doesn't even register among the most popular news sites.