Their Newspapers in Disarray, Editors Feel Lost

Over the past four years, the volume of searches on the keyword “newspapers” has fallen by over 50 percent on Google. Ditto with “magazines.” During the same time frame, searches on the word “blogs” has effectively doubled, and now is consistently higher  than both of the others.

It’s probable that there are around 200 million blogs now online worldwide, (with maybe a third or more of those in China alone) though, of course, a smaller number are active. Blogs account for between 20-25% of the top 100 websites nowadays, and many of them are attracting ever-larger audiences.

Many newspaper and magazine sites have been growing, too, but not fast enough to keep up with the declines posted by their print products.

In this context, another one of those Pew Research Center studies was issued recently with the headline that only 5 percent of newspaper editors are confident in how their media businesses will operate in five years.

That’s just one in 20 editors who still have jobs!

What’s disorienting, of course, is how quickly the Web has become the platform of choice for news — and now, the rapid pace at which mobile devices are supplanting computers as the device of choice for consumers.

These and related developments have left  an entire generation of newspaper execs suffering from “future shock.”

The Pew survey was based on interviews with newspaper editors in 15 cities in four regions of the United States and senior news executives at 259 newspapers nationwide.