I'm not the only one not reading the News Paper!

Interesting times that we live in today. After going through our latest meetings with Windermere Owners about advertising in the world of realtor.com I still am shocked at how the newspaper keeps coming up in our conversations. I just don’t know what aversion we have to limiting how we participate with the news paper. Notice I didn’t say get out of the newspaper but rather how do we still appeal to that very small group that still read the paper and see a return on our investment? I realized that it starts with education.

Here is a great article that can help to explain what is going on with the newspapers both print and online. I think it is fair to say that News Papers are failing today in the print world. What about their online world?  Many think they will just put the news on line and move the eyeballs over. This isn’t what is happening however. Subscribers on the whole are just plain leaving the paper both print and online as well. This graph below is from  Comscore website.  After reading this article you can see that as a company that has to market daily to our customers we need to be looking at different Internet based solutions and understand that as much as we may like our Sunday morning coffee and paper the eyeball isn’t there like it use to be.

As Print Newspapers Decline, How Does Digital Fill the Void?

So why is this happening?  There are many reasons but let me just give you a few that show you just how the customer is getting news.

RSS feeds are pretty amazing. Today with handheld devices like blackberrys and I phones you really have access to real time information just a click away. Sites like NPR RSS. or Yahoo News RSS, and Newsgator the I phone app are tools that allow the handheld user access to real time news and lets me the reader  choose what news I’m interested in getting. Yes the 3.0 world of News.

CNN just had an article talking about the decline on a national level but also states that

” Paul Gillin, a social media consultant, said such losses are to be expected for an industry that has failed to adapt to the influx of online publishing tools and social networking sites.

“Information has become democratized today,” said Gillin, who has predicted print newspapers will disappear by 2015. “You get a lot of advice from your friends, blogs and multiple media sources. Who reads just one newspaper?”

So my concern is that as we move forward in this ever changing world we can’t just be deaf, dumb, and blind to this change. We have to react and work together to figure out how we are going to market in this new age of Social Networking sites and the world of on demand news and advertising. I would love to hear what Ideas you as the reader has, please share.