Irrelevance is also a death of sorts. It is not the immediate in-your-face sort of regular demise, but a slow descent into nothingness that gnaws quietly away at the insides. Different people deal differently with irrelevance. The brave make attempts to change and find ways by which they can matter again. The foolhardy close the doors to the house, draw the curtains, put on that old 70s song and polish the silverware one last time in an attempt to convince themselves that not much has changed.

The printed news medium (including newspapers and magazines) is iconic in numerous ways. It stands tall in history, representing everything from the time of emancipation of information to being shapers of opinion across the globe in all matters regional or local. There is much nostalgia attached to it (who does not crave for the pre-internet days of the broad sheet and the morning cuppa?), but nostalgia is connected at the hip to the generation it is associated with. And generations always change.

The Problems

Let us, for the sake of convenience, imagine a patient on the operating table. The patient's operation is not being carried out on the money paid by herself since she could not afford it. Thus the sponsors come into the picture. The operating theatre now has branding in different areas. Now, the sponsor wants more space and kicks the legs of the patient off the operating table, which is A-OK. After all, there is no operation without the sponsor, right? Okay, enough already with the macabre metaphors.

Pricing: The shelf price of every printed bit of news today is considerably lower than the actual cost accrued in manufacturing it. Newsprint is crazily expensive (which kind of happens when you print on stuff made from felled trees, leading to quotas and similar things), printing it is not cheap either (which is why a lot of publications share printing facilities) and distribution is often the stuff gang wars are made of.

The slashing of prices started In the mid-90s, a time when the industry was not doing too well, but the cover prices were at least closer to what it actually cost to publish the same. What followed could either be termed as sheer brilliance or absolute madness, but the end result was a rapid rise in circulation figures, fueled by prices that were as low as one rupee ('invitation price' being one of the terms used to market it), which was subsidized by advertising.

Playing for scale is a known and terribly old business model, but it also assumes that the product is not priced so low that even at scale cost recovery is not possible. The trouble with the printed news was that each copy was priced so low that selling a copy each to every human being on earth still would not have covered the cost by itself. In other words, neither economies of scale nor returns to scale work with the price point, leading to a situation where the costs had to be covered by advertising.

Value: When a commodity is that tied to advertising, it is inevitable that there also happens a shift in the core value represented by the product away from the consumers of the product. This is precisely the reason why stories being dropped as a norm to accommodate the advertising needs. Which is not as such a wrong thing to happen. But what also happens in the process is that the primary demographic from which the publication derives its value becomes the advertiser and not the reader.

In short, publications have become primarily vehicles for advertising, than news. Which, again, is not news. The trouble with this is that the buy-in from the reader is so low by now that the only value proposition for the reader is the pricing itself, than what the news content is going to be on any given day. Somewhere along the way, news publications have stopped publishing for the readers and started publishing for the advertisers.

Newspapers these days can live without enough people reading them, but they just cannot afford to live without the advertisers.

Latency: Printed news has dealt with latency before. It weathered the radio and video storms quite successfully in terms of being not immediate. In fact, printed news has worked the latency to its advantage by providing textual and pictorial impressions that were persistent and comprehensive, than fleeting. What it did not anticipate was the growth of the internet as medium, which often had a price point of zero for the consumers.

Radio and television are severely constrained by time. Other than live or breaking news scenarios, it is rarely that you will see either of the two go into a story for more than three minutes. It meant that you had to catch the news you wanted to watch/listen to at the right time than the news you wanted to watch/listen catching you at the time you wanted to catch it. Which kind of made the printed medium a very nascent form of on-demand media.

The internet, on the other hand, has no such constraints. It has a breadth and reach that is near-impossible to match when it comes to variety, seriousness or immediacy. It offers more modes of consumption than any other medium. You could read news on the website itself, subscribe to a newsletter to get news pushed to you or use feed readers to get it from a single interface.

Generational irrelevance: This post started with a few lines of irrelevance and more than anything else, what threatens the printed news medium is being irrelevant to the coming generations. My generation (the 70s born) and the ones before that are not digital natives. Creating content, for us, still is something that is natively not digital, nor is consuming it. Writing and reading are still things associated with something that is either written or read off a piece of paper.

Compare that to the upcoming generation. They 'text' each other a lot more than actually writing on a piece of paper and they use a computer more than they would actually use a real notebook and pencil. In evolution's unstoppable journey, digital has trounced anything that is not digital. And the trouble for the printed media is that they hold little appeal to these youngsters, for whom brands by themselves are of less importance than the influence of peers in suggesting and recommending things to them in terms of content.

Points of presence: How do you access a printed news publication? You first need to find one. For that you need to either subscribe to one or go to a vendor and buy one. Compare that with radio (available now on almost every mobile phone), television (in every household), internet (households, offices and handhelds). It is just downright painful to procure the printed version.

The Solutions

We in India have been fortunate enough to be largely detached from the carnage that is happening in the western printed news world. Thankfully, our markets are still expanding, enabling us to be growth-oriented than counting the inches left before we are six feet under in the history of human communication. That said, just because we are growing does not mean we don't face the same risks. In fact, we have more of a risk in the terms that, when it finally turns, the tide will turn swiftly and mercilessly for the Indian printed news publications.

In a recent talk, the infamous Rupert Murdoch said that it is not the newspapers that are dying, it is only a certain group of newsmen who are facing their demise. For a man who made his vast fortune primarily out of the printed news publication, that should be a frightening thought. Instead, rather than getting scared by it, Murdoch is seeing it as a challenge and an opportunity, which is exactly what it is.

For a long while I've said that the critical piece of the equation anyone in media deals with is content. The whole business revolves around how it is created, how much of it is created and who it is created for. As long as you are clear on that front, the medium over which it is distributed (print, radio, television or the internet) is of much lesser importance. If you are a good content creator or a consumer, you should really be medium-agonistic. Else, polishing silverware is really your calling in life.

Pool Resources: Every press conference (referred to in the industry as 'pressers') is an amusing sight if you are not one of the journalists or the apparatus built around appeasing the journalists. There are vast numbers of photographers, reporters, the public relations company representatives and lastly the person who is actually holding the press conference at each of these carnivals.

What comes out of these events are a list of questions answered by the person in the spotlight. Every single publication gets the same quotes, roughly the same photographs and the same stories at the end of the day. Whatever little magic that happens to these stories happen at the editing desk, rendering the exercise of sending hordes of reporters to these pressers and events quite pointless.

What can be done is for the publications to maintain a pool of reporters to cover these events. I know most seasoned reporters will cringe over the suggestion of being deprived of their freebie samosas, booze and other goodies, but if you don't do this, you won't have a job in the future anyway. The logic is the one used in the previous entry, to cut cost of content creation for non-unique content and allow reporters to create good content.

In fact, if publications can really get their act together and do this pooling right, they can actually create an agency of their own. Yes, there are instances when you would need a reporter on ground for a story that is big and developing. Then you can certainly ship someone there. But to maintain four reporters for four publications in a town for that single elusive big event, that may or may not happen in a year, is plain silly and inefficient.

Embrace Technology: Print shops can be notoriously slow in adopting new technology. You can still find quite a few of them running on ancient hardware and software powered by the 'if-it-ain't-broke-don't-fix-it' school of thought. There is no concept of lesser power consumption and cheaper processing cycles leading to more efficient workflows in any of these places.

Embracing technology would mean outfitting the reporters with smart phones, so that they can file stories easier and earlier, allowing for better value addition and improvisation. It would mean outfitting the reporters with digital cameras and also tie ups with major broadband players so that they can transfer the files easily and fast. If that is not possible, pool in resources to have VSAT links all over the country to uplink material.

Reporters and writers will also need to leave their naive attitudes towards the newer forms of distribution, like the mobile and internet, and embrace it wholeheartedly.

Hyperlocal: Going local is not enough anymore and it certainly not enough to do pseudo-local. Pseudo-local is the concept by which the publication's main production guys would pick up stale stories and push out an edition for a far away center to be printed and sent out there. There is little connect that the audience would feel towards something like that. And most importantly, not every local edition works well.

Going hyperlocal would mean that you have to let the local people know, sort and print the news. Meaning that you are going the affiliate or the franchisee route with this. You can allow local players to bid for rights to print the publication in their local circle, with oversight rights built into it. This would essentially mean that you will get a lot of crappy papers and biased information too, but it is not like that does not happen already in any case.

Remember Storytelling?: Attention spans are a diminishing commodity these days. But one thing that gets in the way of it is a well-researched and well-written story. In the chase for quick fix content, most of the news publications have forgotten how to do a story that has both. Publishing content now is primarily a function of grabbing attention for a second or a few minutes than to to sustain it over 20 minutes. In a way, the printed publications have picked up the worst qualities of digital content - the quickie way of living life.

Start Throwing Pasta On The Wall: The good news in the bad is that nobody has really figured out what is to come. It is, thus, essential to start trying out new things. In tomorrow's world, information, including news, would be agonistic of the medium. There would be massive IP-ization of every new device enabling it to pull information from the network. You could possibly be reading a newspaper in the future on the door of your refrigerator.

Devices like Amazon's Kindle are only the first steps in a journey that will accelerate the demise of the printed media. Over time, these devices will lose their inflexible forms and behave much like today's broadsheet, just that these devices would be fully foldable and they can also download their data on the go from WiFi stations and bluetooth stations.

Of course, we don't have the luxury of knowing now which of these devices are going to come up with the goods eventually. That, though, does not mean you can ignore these. Start seeking out these alternatives and start enabling them with content because a lot of these don't really take flight because there is not much in terms of content value they have onboard.

Don't Just Sit On Your Ass, DO Something: One of the reasons why the printed news medium is falling off a cliff in the West is because they did nothing to stem the rot. They should have embraced and worked with the Craigslists of the world than to sit in a corner complaining endlessly. There has been exactly zero innovation in the classified advertisement space since the advent of the internet. It is not the journalists who should be fired for this, it is the sales guys and senior management who should be fired for this.

If there is anything that is enabling the decline of the printed news publication it is the attitude of the publishers, journalists and other stakeholders to wish the problem away in a near-surreal deer-caught-in-headlights moment.

Snap out of it and live like you have a maximum of six months to live and you will see the difference.