by Sheila S. Coronel

	Today newspapers have lost the audience to television.

MAX V. Soliven, publisher of The Philippine Star and self-styled doyen of Philippine journalism, is acting as if it were still the 1960s and newspapers were in their prime. The journalist of 40-something years created a stir recently when he refused to print the response of former Foreign Secretary Roberto Romulo to a series of columns that accused the ex-government official of wrongdoing and called him names.

The prima-donna behavior was reminiscent of the days when newspapers were so powerful that officials quaked at the prospect of being criticized by them. Today, officials are more blasé. Unless the accusations are carried on national television as well, they are not so fearful. Not many would go the length that Romulo has gone, including attempting to place a full-page ad that carried his rejoinder, filing a complaint in the Philippine Press Council, and suing Soliven for libel. The real power now, after all, is television. Only the so-called chattering classes read newspapers. The mass of voters is influenced more by what they see on TV than what they read.

Soliven is the last of the newspaper royals. The glory days of the broadsheets are over. This is the era of television: Filipinos are gaga over it, they watch it avidly, they are awestruck and starstruck by it, they even vote for those who read the TV news. The throne once held by the pipe-smoking, typewriter-pounding, word-spouting Solivens has now been ceded to the likes of the sassy Korina Sanchez, broadcasters who peddle more attitude than substance, and whose venom politicians fear more than the bile of a hundred newspaper columns.

So move over, Max. Newspapers are passé. Their readers are mostly aged 35 and above, and getting older as time goes by. They don't have the mass audience of television or the decibel level of radio. Their main source of power now lies no longer in their reach but in their ability to get policymakers to react to their articles and to influence what the other media report. The audience is elsewhere.

No doubt about it, newspapers are in trouble. Although several of them are still profitable, the newspapers as a whole make for a sunset industry. Businesswise, newspapers are squeezed between stagnant readership rates on one hand and high newsprint costs and shrinking advertising revenues on the other. Not many bother to read dailies these days, opting to get their news from radio or television. Young people, especially, are tuning out altogether, preferring the more visual and entertaining distractions offered by TV and the interactivity that is inherent in the Internet. They see newspapers as old and tired — as boring, as predictable, and as preachy as their parents are.

CERTAINLY, the figures are far from comforting. In a 2003 Social Weather Station survey, only 11 percent of Filipinos polled said they read newspapers every day, compared to some 60 percent who said they watched television daily. The total circulation of Manila-based broadsheets and tabloids is estimated at about 1.5 million, roughly the same level 20 years ago. While there are many more newspapers and tabloids now than during the Marcos era, the combined number of copies they sell has remained the same, even though the population has since more than doubled. For sure, circulation figures were up in the late 1990s up to early 2001, peaking at the height of the Estrada impeachment crisis. But they have dropped off since then, and wide interest in the recent elections did not cause a spike in circulation.

The decline is part of a global trend. Worldwide, newspaper circulation has remained more or less stagnant since the late 1990s, despite growing populations and the rising prosperity of certain sections of the global economy. While newspaper readership is still growing in China, India, and a few other developing countries, it is expected that growth rates will taper off sooner or later, as newspapers face tough competition from other news media and other platforms for delivering news-such as mobile phones.

In the United States, where the loudest alarms have been raised, 80 percent of adults read newspapers everyday in 1964. Forty years later, that was down to 50 percent, and the rate of decline has not stopped increasing. Most surveys predict that young Americans, most of whom don't read printed newspapers now, are not likely to read them when they're older.

In the Philippines, it is even worse. True, interest in news itself remains high, as seen in the more-than-respectable ratings of primetime TV newscasts. But the rising cost of newspapers, especially of broadsheets, which retail at P15 a copy, makes them prohibitive to a large section of the population. Because radio and TV news is free and delivered faster than newspapers, most people tune in to newscasts rather than buy a paper. Moreover, the decline in the quality of English-language education has reduced the readership base of English-language dailies. Except for some tabloids, which are in Taglish, and five Chinese-language newspapers published in Manila, nearly all the national and local dailies are published in English.

Inquirer president Alexandra Prieto-Romualdez adds that the country's archipelagic character makes newspaper distribution a nightmare. Most Manila-based papers rely on domestic airlines to deliver copies outside Luzon, and although the Inquirer itself has invested in four satellite printing sites outside Manila, copies still have to be transported overland so they could make it to outlying towns, some of which could be several hours away.

Moreover, both tabloids and broadsheets rely on street sales in Metro Manila, so the recent traffic schemes, which minimized the stops at intersections, made it harder to peddle newspapers on Edsa. The crackdown on sidewalk vendors, many of whom sell newspapers, also caused a dent in sales. Although not significant, these have made it even more difficult to keep circulation figures up, says Romualdez.

In a Pulse Asia survey conducted during the last election campaign, only four percent of the respondents said newspapers were their primary source of information on candidates and the campaign. Television topped the list with 71 percent and radio was second with 30 percent. Even more worrisome, only five percent said that newspapers were the most credible source of election-related information, compared to 67 percent who said television was the most credible.

Newspapers, therefore, are facing a crisis of both readership and credibility. And, as their audience migrates in droves, so do their advertisers. The print media's share of the total advertising pie is down to only 10 percent, with television taking the lion's share of 72 percent. The total ad revenues of broadsheets in 2003 was P6.1 billion, an amount that is dwarfed by the P43 billion that advertisers plunked into the top two television networks that year. Advertising accounts for 70 percent of newspaper revenues. The total cost of producing newspapers, however, is about twice that of the cover price at which they are sold.

Given these trends, do newspapers have a future? Or are they a dying business? Are print journalists an endangered species, with their craft soon to be as obscure and as doomed as that of the hand-embroiderers of Taal or the Moriones-mask makers of Marinduque?