Week 2: Audience Problems in State of Media

Below are three "audience problems" I identified in the State of Media 2015 report.

In the section titled "Top 10 Digital News Entities,"  8 out of the 10 top sites give away their content for free. Only the NYTimes and USA Today require a subscription and that is after they give away a certain amount of free content (the NYTimes also gives away all video content for free). However, revenues continue to be sluggish and declining for newspaper and cable news. It goes without saying, offering free content is not a winning strategy for the legacy publications. Digital native publications, and local news however are certainly benefiting from this strategy as advertisers are flocking their way.


On Pg. 26 of the State of the Media report, the chart on the right side of the page is very telling. Most of the readership/viewership of newspapers, "are those that are with more education or more income, and are white." I see this as an audience problem, because as the country becomes more racially integrated and the older generation dies off, newspapers need to do more to attract a more diverse audience willing to pay for their product. Secondly, as newspapers pour resources in to building up their digital businesses, it is amazing to see only a relatively small fraction of their viewership comes in the way of digital devices (ICTs) while mobile ad revenue has gone up. In other words, digital strategies appear to have a terrible return on investment.