Newsweek: One Giant Step

Mark the day. The December 31st issue of Newsweek will be the last print issue. Comic book collectors would hear something like this and line up cash in hand buy the comic and immediately place it inside a protective seal. Somehow this moment may have individuals purchase it and place it in a frame at minimum. The end of print? Yes,  this is a giant step toward the demise of print media.

The Pew Research Center reported in September 2012 that more Americans get there news online rather than from newspapers or radio. Twenty-three percent of individuals here in the U.S. said they’d read a print newspaper the day before. That’s half the number who did so in 2000, when nearly 50 percent read a paper the day before. Twenty-nine percent reported reading a newspaper in any format.

For American adults under the age of 30, social media has far surpassed newspapers and has equaled T.V. as a primary source of daily news, according to a new study of news consumption trends by the Pew Research Center for the People & The Press.

The study found 33 percent of those young adults got news from social networks. We all know the impact mobile has had on the print industry. Apple's iPad, the Kindle Fire, the Nook just a few names from the tablet market. The combination of mobile devices and the ever expanding landscape of social media looms like a sun engulfing dark cloud over print media. Additionally, the market for news is graying out. What this means is that the medium of television is slipping in its reach too.

Beyond the world of social greetings and scheduling social events. The goal of communication in the business world is to enact transactions of some sort. As we are gluttons for analytics and wealth, the stats show if you want to reach the young and wealth a business owner needs to get entrenched in the muck of social media and network.

More Americans are downloading news apps in the past couple years, the Pew study says:

25 percent of all Americans (up from 16 percent in 2010).

45 percent of mobile Internet users (up from 20 percent in 2010).

Those growth rates are encouraging, but still a majority of mobile Internet users have not downloaded a news app to their devices. “Those who have downloaded news apps tend to be young, well-educated and wealthy,” the study says. “…Even among mobile Internet users, there are sizable income differences: Fully 60% of mobile Internet users with incomes of at least $100,000 have downloaded a news app, compared with 40% of those with incomes of less than $30,000.”

While the world says farewell to the print version of Newsweek, we look forward to how our communications and interactions as a human race will change. Years ago stories of alien invaders were blockbusters. However, the human story is more compelling than imagined space-men. We now have the vision to see human drama unfold across the goal in real time. The stories sometimes are tragic and violent such as the Lybian-Egyptian conflict. Sometime stories just make us go wow, like Felix Baumgartner's space jump, he broke nearly every daredevil record known to man, also shattered records for most-watched YouTube video of all-time (uh, social media plug).

The love affair we have with sharing our lives and being able to be espial via every social channel we can find.

John is an marketing professional and provides insights on Online Marketing. Contact John ASAP. Go to landing page design Atlanta.