If someone asks you, ‘Why is print media dying?’, you would probably get an answer like ‘people don’t read newspapers or magazines anymore.’ That may be true, but this blog post from Kit Garrett points to an entirely different reason. According to Kit, print media companies make it ridiculously difficult to place ads into newspapers and the like. It’s not going to be declining readership that will be the death of print media, it’ll be the slow-moving companies that will speed their own demise.

I find this extremely interesting, because you don’t hear of companies inserting more and more middlemen – it’s usually the opposite.

So, why keep using print media when nobody reads newspapers anymore and it’s such a huge hassle to set up?

Creative Swiffer advertising in a free Metro newspaper.

I use transit every day, to commute to school, work, and play. Whenever I see a free newspaper box, I usually take a copy and thumb through it while waiting for the bus. I find that I pay a lot more attention to what’s on a newspaper page than, say, a Facebook page – there’s a lot of advertising packed into these two different types of pages, but what’s the difference?

Would you actually click through to any of these links?

For some reason, a company running a print campaign in a national magazine gains much more legitimacy in my eyes than a company running an online campaign. I am inherently distrustful of online ads, because it often feels like I’m being bombarded left and right with ads by extremely sketchy-looking companies. Advertising in print carries much more weight to it – do you remember any one of the thousands of online ads you’ve seen today?  For that reason, I don’t think print is going to go away any time soon.