In the latest installment in a series, a healthcare editor responds to the question – is print media dying? To view earlier installments please click here.
Jack Beaudoin, Vice President, Content & COO, MedTech Publishing Company (publisher of Healthcare IT News and Healthcare Finance News): In the late 1990s I was hired away from my first daily paper by its larger and more metropolitan competitor. When I arrived, I was told I was part of a plan to put my previous employer out of business. That was silly, I replied. Just wait five years — all my readers were over 70 and the newspaper would go out of business on its own accord. In fact, that little daily is still publishing today and it’s the big metro paper that was on the brink of extinction this past winter.
News of the death of print – and of print readers – has been greatly exaggerated, to borrow from Mark Twain. We’ve been eulogizing it for 20 years and the damn thing won’t die. Fact is, some print publications will turn out the lights, and others will continue to press on, and a few will even thrive. I happen to think that in some use cases, newspapers and magazine remain superior media to their electronic cousins.
Certainly, the Web, email, social networks, smart phones, e-readers and other devices show that print isn’t ideal for all use cases. What I think is generally true, however, is that no single medium is ideal for all use cases. For example, Healthcare IT News and Healthcare Finance News readers repeatedly demonstrate an appetite for trustworthy, source-supported news across multiple media. Information is consumed at different times, by different people, for different reasons. The role of publishers is to provide content that readers value when they want it, using the medium of their choosing.
(Incidentally, this is a lesson clinicians are teaching: they may have a preferred way of adding data to a health record, but they likely don’t have one way. Relevant data ought to be populated by voice, by writing, by scanning and by keying — all depending on the immediate context and circumstances.)
I don’t believe the closing of a single print publication portends the death of print anymore than the closure or acquisition of a single healthcare IT vendor suggests that the industry itself is in danger. Publishing is emerging from what some are calling the worst 18 months in a generation and, sadly, there was bound to be a shakeout. As for the future, the unique role that print once played has already been diminished, but print will still have a role to play.
