
The number of people who used a print newspaper in the last week to get local news ranged from 36% in metro areas to 42% in small cities, according to a study released in late September by the Pew Research Center. The survey found that newspaper website consumption was weaker than print, with use running from 31% in metro areas to 20% in smaller markets.
CandysDirt is partnering with BubbleLife to present an online marketing class specifically to address how realtors can use social media and email to own their local market. The class is free, as are most of the techniques. It’s scheduled for Tuesday, July 22 at 11:30 am and you can attend right from your PC or iPad. To signup visit: http://www.realtormarketingclass.com/. There’s no charge! Attend in front of your computer, then tune back in so we can talk about it.
Check out these graphics, too. It’s a crazy media world out there, almost as nuts as our real estate market. We are here at daltxrealestate.com and committed to helping you navigate it in the best possible way. In fact, I’m on my way to Inman Real Estate Connect to load up the oars. Stay tuned.
Two months earlier, it announced the purchase of the neighboring Riverside Press-Enterprise for $27 million from A.H. Belo. Before the deal finalized around Thanksgiving, Kushner suffered public embarrassment as the high-wire act required to locate the cash and close the deal became clear. Then, in January, weeks after the L.A. Register announcement, the Register took 32 jobs out of the newsroom and saw its four top newsroom leaders, including longtime editor Ken Brusic, quit, in something between protest and pure emotional resignation. Who would staff the Los Angeles Register — serving a three-times-larger population in neighboring L.A. County — if jobs were being cut in Orange County? Forty or so staffers soon were prepped to be sent over the county line; no new journalism jobs were to be added.
This is a real estate blog; we don’t care much about the publishing world. Or do we? After all, that is where agents have sunk precious marketing dollars by the bucket loads for ages, believing they are finding buyer. As agents continue to sink dollars into print ads, they are no different than regular risk-blind investors the likes of Kushner and other publishers whose contrarian business strategies to revive a dying media should be applauded but have simply not worked.
The over-investment in print, as print continues to slowly die off, and the under-investment in digital, has only exacerbated the effect of ownership’s poor driving habits.
You have heard it here repeatedly: more and more people are consuming news electronically, through new mediums, watering down the audiences of traditional media.
So why do agents continue to advertise with traditional media? Great question.
According to a new survey published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford, Smartphones are the disruptors, taking a bigger share of our attention than ever: 37 percent of survey respondents said they access news on a phone at least once a week, and 20 percent said they primarily accessed news via mobile devices. Do we see this changing? Yes — it will be 57% or more next year. The percentage of readers who actually pay for news has remained stagnant. A study in Finland, where the print culture is strong, shows that smartphones are winning.
“People talk about smartphones and tablets together, but I think the smartphone is really the disruptor,” said digital strategist Nic Newman, one of the paper’s co-authors. He noted that tablet users tend to skew older. “It’s so much more mobile, and so much more personal.”
As ad revenues declined, publishers decided they would make readers pay for news. Despite many newspapers attempts to do that in one form or another, data show very little change in the absolute number of people paying for digital news over the past year. “In most countries the number paying for any news is hovering around 10% of online users and in some cases less than that.
Even so, our findings are consistent with the recent Pew research report in the United States which suggests that industry activity does not necessarily mean more individuals are paying for news but rather that ‘more revenue is being squeezed out of a smaller, or at least flat, number of paying consumers’.