LITERATURE REVIEW

2.0 Introduction
2.1 Changing Audience Behaviour and a Fragmented Audience The global media in general and newspapers publishing industry in particular has and is witnessing a period of turbulence in their circulation and sales. At the same instance online media penetration is increasing as new devices for accessing digital content become increasingly available to a larger share of the global population. There has been an observed shift by consumers from traditional mainstream newspapers to online news consumption. The pattern by which audiences switch from traditional newspapers to online news providers varies according to age, gender, income levels and nationality. This research agenda seeks to confirm or reject whether this global phenomenon affecting the media has also an impact on the sales and operations of Munn Marketing Pvt Ltd in Bulawayo. Garrison (1991) argues that the advent of New Communication Technologies (NCT) has brought forth a set of opportunities and challenges for conventional media. The presence of new media and the Internet in particular, has posed a challenge to conventional media, especially the printed newspaper (Domingo & Heinonen, 2008). Analysts in industrial organizations and businesses are of the view that the U.S. newspaper industry is suffering through what could be its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression (Barthelemy et al., 2011). Advertising revenues are tumbling due to the severe economic downturn, while readership habits are changing as consumers turn to the Internet for free news and information. Some major newspaper chains are burdened by heavy debt loads. As in the past, major newspapers have declared bankruptcy as several big city papers shut down, lay off reporters and editors, impose pay reductions, cut the size of the physical newspaper, or turn to Web-only publication (Kirchhoff, 2009). It is argued that as technological innovations surface and is adopted into peoples daily lives, old habits do change. However, this change in habits is not supported by audience choices. The audiences desire to get news, information, and entertainment via mass media, whether that means paper delivery or electronic delivery of content remains unchanged. This research seeks to find out if the desire for news and entertainment by the audiences is a factor behind their migration to the online news platform.

Medoff et al (2011, p8) notes that newer media have eroded the audiences of existing older media and thus have affected their ability to generate advertising revenues. Older media may certainly have to adapt to new viewer and listener preferences and behaviours. He goes on to argue that traditional media must adapt to a new competitive environment if they want to survive. Many media outlets have done so by delivering their content online, by extending their existing services and adding new ones, and by repackaging their content.

For many people, the Internet is supplementing existing media rather than replacing them. Younger audiences, however, who are growing up in an environment where media content is always available on the Internet or on their own storage devices, are using traditional media less and less.

Digitization of mass mediated content is probably the most revolutionary innovation since the printing press. That statement may be a stretch but digitization is transforming the media and the way consumers use the media. Transforming analogue signals (continuous waves) into binary or discontinuous signals compresses (reduces) data so they are more easily stored and sent. In binary format, large amounts of information can be archived and retrieved. Users no longer have to search through torn pages or garbled video and audiotapes to find the information they are seeking. Plus, digitized material fits onto miniature, but powerful, portable devices, such as laptops, smart phones, iPods, and electronic books. A digitized dictionary, encyclopaedia, and 10 years of The New York Times can all be slipped into your back pocket. that the presss business model has already been

Colombani and Behar (2011) posit

disrupted. Regardless of device, consumers today expect ubiquitous, instantaneous and free information. In their study of North American and Asian media consumers they found out that nearly 90 percent of those they surveyed only read free news content online. For those with digital tablets, only 10 percent said they would pay for news. Except for sub-segments like micropayments in South Korea, the demand for paid content seemed to be confined to such areas as financial information, local news or investigative journalism. However, even those willing to pay said they would spend three times less for digital news than for the print version. This study, therefore, will seek to ascertain if the desire to consume free online news

products is behind the reduced sales of Munn Marketing newspaper and magazine publications. Further, Colombani and Behars study concluded that most online press readers want to continue to get information for free, whether on digital tablets or not. They will pay only for premium contentsuch as financial information, local news and deep analysis. Digital reading devices are thus an additional distribution channel for an industry that still needs to redesign its business model (Colombani and Behar 2011).

2.2 Decline in Advertising Revenue and Newspaper Circulation The share of advertising going to print newspapers has been declining for the last decade in most Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, and the newspaper advertising market has more recently experienced large falls in offline and online advertising growth. This turnaround in newspaper advertising revenues started to affect some countries much earlier (as early as 2000 for Denmark, France, the United States, Japan, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom) than others (from 2007 in Canada, Finland, Italy and Spain).

The Internet as an advertising medium threatens each form of printed advertising. With its perceived free content in portals such as Yahoo!, the Internet rivals newspapers in delivering local and national news. Free services such as craigslist threaten printed classified advertising. With the plethora of free online information from merchants, product manufacturers, hobbyists, concerned citizens and the government, in conjunction with powerful search engines used to uncover sought-after information, the Internet also challenges magazines that have traditionally excelled at targeting niche markets by lifestyle. Not only does the Internet impact main-stream media advertising, it is also a powerful competitor to the printed forms of direct marketing. The ability to customize information immediately threatens the growth of personalized direct mail. And printed catalogues are being replaced by the e-commerce portals of some retailers.

With the internet newspapers not only lost readers, but also advertisers. Especially classified advertisements, employment and real estate advertisements moved online, where transactions between sellers and buyers can more easily and directly be accommodated, for instance through the popular Graigs list and eBay, or through local versions of market places, dating,

employment and real estate sites. Online advertisers can also gain direct access to their clients instead of via advertising in a newspaper, which lowers the advertising income for classifieds in newspapers (Van der Wurff, 2005b) (Kung, Picard, & Towse, The Internet and the Mass Media, 2008).

Meanwhile, in all Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, internet traffic to online news sites has grown rapidly. About 5% of all internet visits are related to reading news online, which the OECD says may be a conservative estimate. In fact, the combined print and online audience of news organisations may be growing. But on average, online advertising only accounted for around 4% of total newspaper revenues in 2009. In the US newspaper industry, advertising has decreased rapidly between 2004 and 2009. While newspapers online ad revenue has grown, it has not grown nearly enough to make up the difference.

The way in which consumers are reading print has changed and will continue to do so. Newspapers, magazines and other printed publications have what amounts to a regular appointment with their readership; this is complemented by the use of the internet throughout the day for up-to-date news and comment. Although the print media still has a role to play in advertising, this is only limited to brand launch and advertising. The impact is longer as strong as in the past. The internet has challenged the mainstream newspaper industry due to its ability to reach consumers at different times and in different contexts throughout the day; in multitude of formats and channels. Print advertising cannot keep pace with consumers changing patterns of media consumption.

Online, news providers are looking for alternative revenue streams to compensate for lagging advertising revenue and declining subscriptions to their print newspapers. Downie Jr. & Schudson (2009) argue that it is unlikely that all news organizations can be supported by online advertising revenues. Revenues from online advertising are growing, but not fast enough to fill the gap opened up by the decline in revenues from print advertising and circulation.

Because information online is often free and easily accessible, legacy news organizations are losing their power over audiences and advertisers. The audience for news has fragmented and this has a negative effect on advertising income. Some newspaper publishers have tried to

compensate for the loss of print advertising by launching or taking over successful websites (dating sites, online market places etc.).

Online news providers can expand their geographical reach with little extra costs, but online they are also confronted with much more competition. Grueskin and others (2011) explain how legacy news providers are losing their grip on the platform and their role as aggregators of news to Google, Facebook and Twitter. This means that they are also becoming less interesting for advertisers. At the same time the prices for online advertisements (often expressed in CPM = costs per thousand page impressions) are much lower than those for print advertising.

Prices for advertising space are very low and there is a vast volume of advertising space available on the internet. Online advertising typically brings in less than 20% of a newspapers advertising revenue, and rates on all but the most prominent pages are falling (Koen, 2011). There are billions of pages on the internet, so the value of an individual page is lower than that of a printed page. Another reason is that online audiences are more fragmented, spend only short time on news sites, easily click through to other sites and generally have a short attention span.

Meanwhile, there are historic changes in the business of news production. For decades, the commercial market has subsidized the production of news through the support of print advertising. The Internet has broken that model. The business model for newspapers is collapsing as readers move online. The revenue stream for online advertising simply will not sufficiently pay for the production of news. And since the news business could never monetize the value of the news as a public good beyond its value to advertisers the old structure is crumbling. RTE-Corporate Communications (2011) conducted a study in the United States to assess how the migration by audiences from print media to the internet affected the circulation of newspapers. They found out that the key challenge for newspapers is to hold on to lucrative print readers, while finding ways to make more money from a growing online audience that generally reads the paper for free. Print circulation of daily papers fell by 13.5% from 2001 to 2008, and 17.3% for Sunday editions. Average daily newspaper print circulation fell 8.7% during the six-month period ending March 31, 2010, compared to the same period in 2009

During the previous six-month period, circulation declined nearly 11% from the previous year.

The RTE-Communications report notes that the declining circulation numbers reflect, in part, a conscious effort by some papers to reduce printing and other costs by moving to onlineonly editions or shrinking their delivery area. The Detroit News and Detroit Free Press, which are combined in a joint operating agreement, cut daily delivery of the print newspapers to three days a week. Newspapers have their own ad campaign to promote the industry. As print circulation declines, online readership has surgedthough it is difficult to give a precise figure, since estimates on online readership, developed through surveys and sampling techniques, vary widely.

Audience measurement firm comScore pegged unique visitors to top newspaper groups (websites operated by newspaper companies) at 123 million in May 2010. Newspapers are attracting online readers from well beyond their local communities, including other cities and countries. Newspaper executives point to online readership as an endorsement of their product, saying public interest in news has increased, not diminished. But readership trends are complex, as habits and preferences evolve in response to the enormous array of information available on the Internet, television, and through devices such as hand-held readers and cell phones.

Though readers want news, they do not necessarily want it from a traditional paper, and are using multiple sources. For example, there is just one newspaper in the top five news websites in 2009, as measured by Nielsen Online. The biggest news websites, in descending order, are Yahoo News, MSNBC Digital Network, AOL News, CNN.com, and NYTimes.com. MSNBC had nearly twice the online audience of the New York Times.

Among those sites, Yahoo and AOL News in the past have mainly aggregated news from other organizations, though they have recently started operations to increase their own original content. Consumer demand and technology are changing the way news is read and offered. Most newspapers offer a general package of sports, entertainment, business, and national stories, with editors signalling the importance of the news by its placement in the physical paper. Today, websites like Google or Yahoo are mimicking the job of editors; by using sophisticated computer programs to automatically compile links to content from

newspapers, wire services, blogs, and other sources from around the world. Other so-called aggregators run websites that mix links to newspapers stories with some original content, and bloggers frequently mingle newspaper and other reporting with their own commentary and insights. Increasingly individual stories are displayed on the Web as discrete products, separate from a broader newspaper.

The newspaper publishing industry is facing a structural challenge in which paid titles have seen a long-term decline in circulation volume while advertisers have been moving from newspapers to online channels and into new formats. These trends are forecast to continue. Print advertising income showed moderate growth between 2004 and 2007, but is declined by 4.5% each year between 2009 and 2013 as the recession exacerbated the ongoing migration of readers and advertisers to online media. Meanwhile, online advertising showed double digit growth rates between 2004 and 2008.

Statistics pointing to the steady decline in newspaper readership and general circulation in North America in recent years, combined with news of more and more newspaper operations being shut down, do not indicate a good future for the industry, with many even envisioning its complete demise in just a few years ahead. According to Epstein (2007), 80 per cent of Americans once read newspapers, while now less than 50 per cent do. In the 1990s alone, daily readership fell from 52.6 to 37.5 per cent, and from 1999 to 2004, according to the Newspaper Association of America, general circulation dropped by 1.3 million.

Dumpala (2009) writes that 105 newspapers were closed in the United States in the first semester of 2009, with a loss of 10,000 jobs. Print ad sales fell 30 per cent in the first quarter of that same year and 23 of the top 25 newspapers reported circulation declines between 7 and 20 per cent. Meyer (2004) notes that newspaper advertising as a share of the GDP fell from 0.7 to 0.5 per cent in the past half-century.

Even within the United States, however, a different scenario emerges outside of the big cities. This view is shared by Meyer (2004), when he writes that community newspapers are doing better than metropolitan ones. Plothow (2007) points to how, in spite of how large papers still account for the majority of the national circulation, 96 per cent of all titles published in the country have circulations under 50,000. Owned by smaller companies, small-town

newspapers are staffed by younger people who are less burdened by traditional business practices, making them more agile and willing to try new possibilities. Profit margins for community newspapers remain high despite of the recession. Despite the fact that newspaper readership has been declining since the 1920s, total newspaper circulation in the United States didnt start to decline until 1990, leading to some casual conclusions that the Internet is the problem (Nichols, 2007). It is true that the Internet multiplied the number of available sources of information and provided a convenient and upto-the-moment access to news, but its important to examine how exactly the emergence of this new offering is a bad thing for newspaper operations.

Some authors, however, have a less apocalyptic perspective of this phenomenon. Akin (2009b) shows that there were still more than 1,400 dailies in the United Sates and 98 dailies in Canada at the end of 2008, most of which are believed to be profitable, despite the recession. Wilkinson (2009) calls the death of the newspaper one of the great exaggerations of todays economic downturn. He explains that whats currently happening is that newspaper companies in certain countries like the United States, Canada, United Kingdom and Australia have certain business models and circumstances that make them more vulnerable during a recession time, while newspapers in other countries are not so dramatically affected by it. He differentiates between less affected and more affected operations based on their business models.

The newspaper industry is facing two simultaneous crises stemming from the decline in newspapers circulation and advertising revenues and the rise of widely available and free online news content. The United States suffered the most severe fall in circulation, and advertising revenues dropped 8.7 percent in the period from March to October 2010. This reduction in revenues from advertising was further exacerbated by the financial crisis of 2007-08. The entrance of alternative online sources of news also marked a new era of digital competition. Consequently, one of the principal challenges for news organizations became the establishment of new, alternative revenue streams that do not rely solely on the traditional print model.

Fig 1 WNIS Industry Development Figure 1 points to three important factors that contributed to the twin crises. Print circulation has been declining for decades, but consumer behavior began to change most rapidly with the increasing use of the Internet (see Figure 1). The breadth of information available online, and the opportunity to personalize news consumption according to individual interests, coupled with being able to get news updates several times a day as opposed to once in the morning over coffee pushed audiences online for their news. Figure 2 provides a clearer idea of how steep the decline in circulation for American daily newspapers has been in the past decades.

Fig 2 Daily US Newspapers 1940-2007

A second critical factor is the fact that the majority of online content is available for free. The sources are innumerable; from opinion blogs to online only newspapers, such as The Daily, a newly launched newspaper customized for Apples iPad users. News information websites and applications continue to grow exponentially. The idea of getting news for free online became even more appealing during the financial crisis of 2007-8, a period when newspaper circulation in the United States dropped 30 percent.

Thirdly, changes in consumer behavior were accompanied by the migration of advertising budgets from the print to the online realm, albeit at a fraction of the revenues provided from print advertising sales. Scott Karp, co-founder & CEO of Publish2, a content distribution platform, refers to this phenomenon as the 10 percent problem. Taking The New York Times as an example (prior to the paywall introduced in March 2011), Karp points out that print circulation is about 10 percent of total audience reach, while online advertising revenue is about 10 percent. The result is a nearly perfect inverse relationship of what online revenues and print advertising should generate given their respective readership.

The combination of these three factors, and their consequences, has led to what is now known as the twin crises. News organizations today are faced with one complex, central challenge: dealing with declines in print circulation and advertising revenues, while facing and competing with increasingly available non-monetized online content. The twin crises have a range of consequences for the industry. First, job losses continue to occur and older, more experienced, journalists that cost more to retain, are becoming easily dispensable. Secondly there is a decline in journalistic quality and the rise of down-market or popular publications. It is interesting to point out that the growing commercial success of tabloids has been linked to the broadening of the reading public and the inclusion of new, lower-income audiences. Finally, news organizations are turning to more competitive and qualitative approaches as in the cases of pay wall launching and further ownership consolidation, with mega industry players acquiring smaller ones.

2.3 The Internet as Complimentary to traditional mainstream newspaper publishing

Barabsi (2004) conducted a research to test the idea that the Internet, because of its instantaneous availability and virtually non-existing costs of publishing and content censorship, embodies a democratic and egalitarian forum where everybody finally gets the same chance as opposed to the traditional mass media system - to be heard and noticed. The results of that research showed that not to be true. Making information available doesnt guarantee that it will be actually viewed by anybody. He concluded that the topology of the World Wide Web determines that only a small fraction of the billions of documents available online ends up generating significant traffic to actually create an audience. The architecture of the World Wide Web is instead dominated by highly connected nodes he called hubs, which are locations or nodes formed in information networks that are extremely visible and referenced by other locations. He elaborates by saying that the domination of the web traffic by hubs is the strongest argument against the utopian vision of an egalitarian cyberspace (p.58). Many authors argue that newspapers, because of their established tradition and credibility as generators of news, are in the best position to dominate the Internet news game by establishing their online versions as the most trusted nodes of news traffic in the web. Meyer (2004) writes that newspapers, because of their editorial content and not in spite of it, are positioned to yield more information than any of the substitutes (p.61), and that an internet-based medium cant easily duplicate their influence. Newspaper analyst Donna Logan (as quoted in Boswell, 2009) describes newspapers as the foundation of the entire media game, leading the news agenda and paving the way for other sources. She points that TV, radio and the Internet news are very dependent on newspapers specialized staff, databases, and large newsrooms. Similarly, Nichols (2007) writes that the Internet has yet to emerge as a distinct journalistic force or speak with the same authority of traditional daily newspapers. These continue to establish the parameters for what gets covered and how, and that neither broadcast nor digital media have developed the reporting infrastructure or the level of credibility that newspapers enjoy (p.177). According to Boswell (2009), The Canadian Newspaper Association says newspapers have managed to maintain a solid presence in their

communities in a rapidly shifting media landscape due to their influence in public affairs and trust among citizens. The online version of the local newspaper is the local news site in most North American cities (LaPointe, 2009). Communities tend, in the long run, to support a single marketplace, to converge on a spot where buyers and sellers are more likely to find each other (Meyer, 2004). Former magazine publisher Mitch Joel (as quoted in Boswell, 2009) mentions that 40 per cent of all Internet traffic goes to newspaper websites. Akin (2009b) examines the dominance of web news by online versions of traditional newspapers in Canada.

He points that Canadian newspapers have been successful online precisely because of their offline popularity and credibility. Madigan (2007) notes the unchecked, unprofessional, passionate and fact-less nature of online content. With many questionable news sources on the Internet, a major daily stands out as a trustable one. Online news is actually complementing the paper instead of replacing it, and can be an opportunity to flourish instead of a threat to survival for newspaper companies (LaPointe, 2009). Readership of the print version of newspapers in Canada remained steady from 2007 to 2008, with over 14 million people (73 percent of the adult population) saying they read a newspaper at least once a week. When you aggregate the print format with the web, newspapers are actually reaching more people than ever before (Akin, 2009b). Making newspaper online versions profitable, however, has proven to be a challenging step.

The nature of the audiences has been changed with new communications technologies, and what is currently seen is an overload in their ability to receive and consider so many messages (Meyer, 2004). Shafer (2007) writes that, even as the complete gestalt of local, state, national and international news plus sports, comics, classified, opinion and hints on fashion, home, entertainment, and food (p.130) offered by a print newspaper remains attractive, many buyers are taking advantage of the web capabilities of unbundling the news they want from the news they dont want. Significant differences in the quality of the experience provided by the print and online news have also been examined. Meyer (2004) defends that the catalogue function has been one of newspapers strengths in competing with television, that turning the pages to find specific product information, a reader makes the newspaper a good information retrieval machine because you can interact with it.

The Internet was able to combine the added appeal of images with this ability to get detailed information. However, outgoing Librarian and Archivist of Canada, Ian Wilson (as quoted in Boswell, 2009) defends that seeing the information in the disjointed, layered fields of the computer screen too often leads to a fragmented world view that the newspaper experience paper in hand, to be leafed through surpasses every time.

As expected, as a reflection of the globalized character of modern international economy, the economic performance of each of the six countries, despite certain local peculiarities, display an overall similar behaviour during the studied period. The two downturn-upturn cycles included in the period are clearly defined in each national reality. Similarly, Internet penetration rates have been going up in all six countries on almost every year of the examined period. This becomes an excellent shared reference, a backdrop against which local differences in circulation trends become more noticeable. Each trend comparison (paid circulation vs. economic performance and paid circulation vs. Internet penetration) will be discussed for each country individually and on a one-on-one basis, with the purpose of facilitating the quantitative approach in detecting contrasts and similarities.

2.4 The Macro-Economic Environment: Effects on Production and Audience Consumption

Global mainstream newspapers experienced tremendous financial difficulties because of the recession that began in 2008. As the costs of paper, ink, labour, and distribution have increased along with decreases in circulation and advertising dollars, many papers have been forced to consolidate, stop hard copy publication, or just publish web versions of their newspaper. Digital media have not replaced traditional media, but they have taken over a large portion of the audience.

As the traditional suppliers of news and information and traditional locale for advertising, newspapers face the most acute and relentless pressure. This pressure is being felt worldwide. Profound structural change is reshaping the newspaper sector around the world through factors such as:

Declining circulations and revenues Drift of audiences and advertising spending to the internet Changing media habits, especially among younger people Emergence of new media competitors

Stock market analysts, focused on risk and return for clients, have expressed deep concern about the newspaper sector, the effect of structural change and its long-term health. One analysis points out that TV stocks have fared less poorly in price performance since the market peak in October 2007 (-36% average for free-to-air stations in Europe) compared to newspapers/consumer publishers (-70%) and another sector even more affected by structural change, directories (-95%). Newspapers around the world have been moving into online publishing, with a mixture of newspaper content, classifieds and online-only offerings. Some have made the transition to online much more successfully than others. Only a few have succeeded in winning both audiences and substantial revenues online.

Barthelemy et al (2011) conducted a research on the Future of Print Media and discovered the following information on the countries that they studied: Canada. Paid circulation in Canada keeps decreasing with different rates during the whole period, with a single exception in 2001 when it showed a marginal (0.3%) increase. Although it shows a consistent downward trend, variation in paid circulation shows no direct relation to the countrys economic performance. Paid circulation at times follow the economy, goes in the opposite direction, or remain unaltered in the presence of strong change in economic indicators. A possible relation can only be observed in the significant year of 2008, when both numbers clearly decreased more than in previous years. Internet penetration rate increase peaked in 2002 (as in most countries examined) at +36 percent with only a slight impact in paid circulation decrease, and has been constantly increasing since then in more moderate rates that somehow could be matched with the decrease rates in circulation, except in 2008, when circulation dropped dramatically (-8 percent) in relation to a steady and moderate increase in Internet penetration of only +3.5 percent.

United States. Not surprisingly, the behaviour of economic indicators in the United States are, in overview, similar to that in Canada, a reflection of strong trade relations between the

two countries. The US displays, however, a higher volatility and suffers more yearly losses than Canada. The variation in paid circulation in the US in the period is also steadily on a moderate decline, but appears to suffer a slightly more direct effect from the economic cycles, as increases and decreases in the trends tend to match up a little bit more (though not maintaining a proportional correspondence) than in Canada.

Like in Canada, the consistent increase in Internet penetration rates in the United States is matched by that consistent decline in circulation. On a more year-by-year focus, that behaviour also appears to inversely match that of decrease rates in circulation in most years examined, but with the actual percent variation being different. The exception here seems to be 2008, with a lower increase in Internet penetration (+3 percent compared to +4 percent in the previous year) seeing a higher decrease in circulation (-4 percent compared to -3 percent in 2007).

The Netherlands. Of all the countries examined, the Netherlands are the most affected by periods of economic downturn, with their economic indicators showing the biggest losses in both 2002 and 2008. Paid circulation shows a fairly constant decline during the whole period examined, but with decrease rates actually becoming smaller since 2005. The dramatic swings in the economic health do not reflect in the slight variations in the circulation rates at all, and even show an inverse relation at times, like in 2008, with the circulation decrease rate actually easing (-2.1 percent in relation to -2.9 in the previous year) in the presence of a dramatic (-52 percent) economic loss (Fig. 8). Internet penetration spiked both in 2002 and 2005 with no considerable effect in the circulation rates (Fig. 9), even though, like in the Canada and United States cases, the overall correspondence between declining circulation and Internet advance is clear during the whole nine-year period. Since 2005, as further increases in the countrys already high penetration rates (in the +70 percent levels) become more difficult, they show much lower increases and even a decrease (as shown in the -1 percent decrease in 2009), while the decrease in paid circulation, as mentioned before, has been easing.

Brazil. Emerging countries show spikes in economic growth during upturns of much higher magnitude than developed countries. Between 2002 and 2007, Brazils stock market performance has been formidable, including a staggering spike of more than 97 percent in 2003 (Fig. 12). When paid circulation is contrasted with the economic trend, a clear

correspondence is found, with the variation in circulation following the variation of the stock index in every year of the period except 2004, when a deceleration in the economic growth (but still representing a positive variation) saw the beginning of an upward trend in circulation. This upward trend is maintained even through the significant year of 2008 (-41 percent economic retraction) with the positive variation easing from +11.8 percent but to a still healthy +5 percent. Internet penetration also appears to have an impact on circulation in an inverse manner during the whole decade in a year-by-year focus, the only exception being 2005, when a strong deceleration in Internet penetration variation (+10 percent in relation to +44 percent in the previous year) saw circulation increase going up from 0.8 percent to a strong +4 percent (Fig. 13). But in an overall focus, as Internet penetration remains climbing, the shift from decrease to increase in circulation that starts in 2004 is a contradiction to the previous correspondence.

Some observers believe that the challenge faced by conventional media, especially newspapers, has to do with the perfect storm of the global economic crisis, dwindling readership and advertising dollars, and the inability of newspapers to monetize their online efforts (Yap, 2009). Newspapers, especially in the West and the US in particular, have lost the lion's share of classified advertisement to the Internet. The average daily circulation of US newspapers declined 7% in the last and first quarters of 2008 and 2009 respectively, according to the latest data from the Audit Bureau of Circulations. The data indicate that a shift in consumer behaviour has led more people to get their news and information online (New York Times, April 2009).

Conclusion The chapter discussed findings by previous studies on the impact of digitalisation on print newspapers. The global newspaper fraternity is changing and facing a downward trend in their circulation and advertising revenue. There is a massive shift in terms of audiences. Audiences have migrated to the online media due to the availability of a plethora of news to choose from, income levels and easy accessibility. However, other studies have noted that, the internet, in other contexts serves as a complimentary platform to the offline mainstream press. The macro-economic environment also determines consumer behaviour as consumers are forced to go online for their news due to poor income levels.