Record Tablet Sales Could Give Battered Newspaper Industry Hope

Industry leaders say a new source of revenue needs to be found. Although the Newspaper Association of America in October reported that traffic to newspaper websites has increased 20 percent compared to the previous year, the revenue for web based advertising hasn't been able to make up for lost revenue in the print product. This has led the industry to shed journalists over the past decade and has resulted in the closing of metropolitan daily newspapers.

The Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California doesn't expect the print-to-digital trend to reverse.

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"Circulation of print newspapers continues to plummet, and we believe that the only print newspapers that will survive will be at the extremes of the medium," director Jeffrey Cole wrote in a recent post on its website.

In five years, he predicts only four major daily newspapers will continue in print form: The New York Times, USA Today, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. He also predicts some local papers will also survive.

But others say taking the paper out of newspapers isn't necessarily a bad thing. For starters, the cost of producing a print newspaper is high. Transmitting news digitally will lead to a significant reduction in print costs, Siegel points out.

Whether the newspaper industry will succeed with tablet growth will depend on whether people will pay as much to subscribe on a tablet as they did with a print newspaper, and if advertisers will spend as much money reaching out to these readers as they do courting other media consumers, news industry analyst Ken Doctor told IBTimes.

"We don't really know yet," he said regarding whether tablets will help the newspaper industry. "Everything is still in transition."

Will People Pay for News on Tablets?

Many print subscribers receiving tablets for the holiday may still want to keep their traditional newspaper, Doctor believes. For those who make the print to digital switch, the cost of a tablet subscription is usually lower than a print subscription, meaning less revenue for publishers initially.

Yet print subscribers will slowly familiarize themselves with the tablet format, Doctor predicts, which will eventually allow newspaper publishers to charge similar rates for tablet and print subscriptions.

However, getting people who aren't paying for news content to subscribe on a tablet will pose a larger challenge. Initially, many of these people will continue to seek out free web content, Doctor said. He notes that people generally spend the same amount of money over time to receive their news, regardless of the medium of which it is obtained.