TOI's Sanat Hazra: "Focus on print and digital"

Although the report has an American flavour to it, there are inputs from publishers across the world. India's Sanat Hazra from Times of India said: "Focus on print and digital, not on print or digital. Complement each other and don’t fight each other."

The Wan-Ifra press release says, "It is astounding to witness the tenacity with which the more than 400-years-old news medium asserts itself in the digital era. The study doesn’t outright suggest that publishers abandon their digital efforts, rather, to play to the strengths of where newspapers’ audience and revenues mostly reside."

The report is the brainchild of journalism professor H Iris Chyi and doctoral student Ori Tenenboim of the University of Texas. Using a longitudinal analysis of readership data of 51 US newspapers, the findings of the study, essentially, said that newspapers’ assumptions, and subsequent strategies, that “print will one day die” were woefully off the mark.

The Wan-Ifra press release adds, "The reach of the print versions of the investigated newspapers dropped from 42.7 to 28.8 percent between 2007 and 2015. The online reach of the newspaper websites stagnated, but in the same period rose from 9.8 to just ten per cent."

"Therefore we do not believe that the readers abandoned the print product for the websites of the newspapers”, said Chyi. Indeed, the online versions of the newspapers seem to be once again on the losing side in the last years: In 2011 their reach had actually achieved 10.7 per cent."