IRS Special: Regular consumption in print is declining. Why? <span class="txtblack"> - Presented by MINT</span>

The last couple of rounds of IRS have revealed that the regularity of consumption of print is declining while in other media such as TV, radio and internet, the figure is on a growth.

Why is it so?

First, it’s about consumer behaviour. They want access to content when they need it and at their convenience. In the case of print they have to wait for the next morning. The consumer also wants to be entertained. This is why the television set and internet have become so important for today’s consumers.

On the other hand, TV has always been about entertainment, to the extent that Indian news channels have also jumped on to the bandwagon of entertaining viewers rather than providing news.

With the penetration of TV, especially Cable & Satellite (C&S), growing consistently over the years, more and more people started getting exposed to news, current affairs and genres which were earlier the domain of the print medium. An avid traveller or a foodie now has access to a Discovery Travel and Living and NDTV Good Times. A nature lover could now watch the NGCs and the Discoveries of the world and not have to rely on the magazine format anymore.

Another factor that has worked in favour of news channels is their ability to give news, views and analyses in real time unlike a magazine which can carry such content only in the next issue. This means that the news that one reads in the morning is actually stale since the readers have already seen it on television the night before.

Growing computer - and internet - penetration has also helped magazine readers get online access to their topics of interests. This, in turn, has reduced their dependence on magazines. Growth in traffic on the business portals as well as in the viewership of the business news genre on television and the drop in readership of business magazines is perhaps evidence of this hypothesis.

I personally believe it is time for content owners to think about their content rather than the medium. To elaborate, print media especially newspaper owners should think of news and other attractive content and how they can make this content available to consumers on different media like print, TV, internet or mobiles. Instead of selling column centimetres in their print product, they can conceive and sell packaged offerings across media.

Also I think its time for the publication owners to rationalize in markets where there are multiple players in the same genre. Mumbai, for instance, has more than five English language newspapers and when consumers subscribe to more than two, their frequency of reading any of these dailies goes down - a person might not read TOI everyday but only on four days and read a DNA on the other three days of the week.

These phenomena are being seen in the readership surveys every year and will continue in future unless some changes happen in the way media owners think.

The author is executive director, West, Starcom India.