Philipp Bock

The Crisis of Print

See the finished project

German newspapers are desperate. Many publishers are struggling to remain afloat as more and more readers are getting their news through other means, most notably the internet. And their situation must be dire if they were able to convince the government to write several controversial new laws that greatly restrict public-service broadcasters’ freedoms on the internet and allow publishers to charge news aggregators for using their content.

But can it be that bad? Are publishers justified in their fear of extinction, or are they exaggerating their concerns? To find out, we at OpenDataCity gathered over ten years’ worth of circulation numbers for nearly all German newspapers and magazines and set out to model their decay. To quantify their suffering, we calculated a half-life for each publication (the time in which it loses half of its circulation) and extrapolated their numbers until 2040.

Our findings were not as damning as one might think – not universally, at any rate. Yes, daily newspapers are suffering, some of them taking as little as 15 years to lose half their readership, but others might be around for centuries to come. And weekly newspapers have very little reason for concern. Childrens’ and youth magazines seem much more justified in their fears: half-lives of five years or less are not uncommon.

Scientifically, of course, our method is flawed. Predictions are hard, especially when they’re about the future. But the debate about the future of print has so far been led, it seems, mostly by emotion rather than facts. We hoped to change that by making a first step towards a (slightly) more rational debate, and it looks like we might be succeeding: Some publishers seem to have taken up our confrontation and replied with their own interpretations of our findings or reactions to our method.

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