Did the Internet Kill Magazines and Newspapers?

[Ramona Islam]

The Research 'Views interview series focuses on the research practices of members of the Harvard community.*

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In this first installment of Research 'Views, on May 11, 2010, I interviewed Harvard senior Anthony Pino at the Lamont Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We discussed his research process and the findings of his thesis, "Did the Internet Kill Magazines and Newspapers?" 26 minutes. To read the thesis, go to http://tonypino.com/thesis. For a transcript, see below.

* ALLN members beyond Harvard are also welcome to document research practices in their own teaching and learning environments for Research 'Views. With adequate interest, the series might encompass the academic community as a whole.

	Listen with QuickTime at left, or listen with blip.tv. Still can't hear the interview? Try downloading it. A transcript follows:

Welcome to the first installment of Research 'Views, a program focusing on the research practices of members of the Harvard community. Harvard senior Anthony Pino is interviewed in this segment about his thesis, "Did the Internet Kill Magazines and Newspapers?" Anthony concentrates in economics with a secondary field in Italian. He will be working for a venture capital firm in Boston for the next two years, and then will attend Harvard Business School.

Q. The title of your thesis asks a provocative question: Did the Internet kill magazines and newspapers? How did you become interested in exploring that question, and why do you think it's important for you and for others?

A. I became interested in it because of the magnitude of the problem and the attention it was getting; a), because I really like newspapers and magazines, and b), I consume a lot of information both online and offline. It was very close to home, so I thought that would be an interesting thing to investigate. It's important in the sense that, the way information flows around a society is pretty important in getting things done. I think it's important to others because you can't make decisions without information, right? And whether that decision is who you vote for, what car to buy, or where to go on your next vacation--those are all important decisions, and the more symmetrical the information is, the more free flowing the information is, the better decisions you would expect people to make.

Q. When you were trying to answer that question, what did you discover?

A. There was a bit of a surprise. There were a couple obvious things, and then a bit of a surprise. The first thing is that it looks like the Internet did kill newspapers. I can get into the methodology later, but we're looking at how broadband penetration affects, to the extent that we can measure it, subscription rates in print publications. It definitely killed the newspaper. There's a high correlation there. We think it's causal. So the newspaper was hurt a lot. Magazines weren't hurt that much, looking at data through 2008. Surprisingly, most magazines have been resilient, and the declines in circulation haven't been uniform. That is to say, that based on what I could look at, the less visual the magazine was, the more it was affected by the Internet. So to give you an example, TV Guide--very much affected by the Internet. The information it provides has a short window of relevancy and it's mostly textual. That's something for which the Internet can substitute very easily. Whereas, if you look at Elle Decor, which is a home design magazine--it's very visual. A lot of the value of the information is looking at it a certain way and seeing it laid out in the magazine.

Q. Your methodology was informed by an article that was published in 2002 by Brown and Goolsbee, and this used a panel data set of Internet access and control variables to explain changes in a dependent variable. How did you happen to come across that article in the first place, and why was its methodology useful to you?

A. Sure. That sounds like a lot of gibberish; it's actually pretty important stuff. So, your first question: I was referred to that article by my thesis adviser, Ben Edelman, a professor at the business school. He said, "Listen, you should check this out." Austan Goolsbee is a great economist, and I spoke to some other people, he's a very well-respected economist. And his particular methodology was relevant for what I wanted to do. His methodology is great, because a panel data basically says, let's track a certain number of entities (say, states), and let's not just look at all of these states in one year, but let us track all of these states over the course of multiple years, so you have a grid of data as a result. And what that lets you do is the following: It lets you control for unmeasurable factors at both the state level and the year level. So, if for some reason something different is happening in Massachusetts versus Wyoming, and it's not education or income or something measurable, we can still control for that, because we can look at the trend for those states relative to one another. Likewise, if you look at the year data, it lets you say, "Is there some trend that we can't measure, but it changes over time, and it changes over time consistently across those states?" So, something like a societal tendency to read less would be picked up that way. The result is that it lets you really measure some specific things robustly by controlling for things that you can't measure normally.

Q. You also employed data published by the Audit Bureau of Circulations and the Federal Communications Commission. How did you happen to discover these sources, and would you describe the process that you went through in accessing that information?

A. Sure. The first way I discovered them was part thanks to my thesis adviser and part to a little research I did. My adviser suggested that I look at the FCC for information about broadband penetration, and I Googled around and made my way to the FCC site under "statistics." And it turns out that Congress wanted to know where broadband was, and so they required providers to report subscription levels at the line level twice a year, basically, from 1997 onward by state. The FCC had that data online. You could download it and look at it. The other source of data, which is the Audit Bureau of Circulations--it turns out that once I started to look at this, this is really the definitive way people look at the print industry. It's a tripartite organization that's a group of publishers and advertisers and distributors of newspapers and magazines. They were formed in the late 1920s when, basically, advertisers thought that they might be being defrauded, because they had no way to measure circulation. So, if I tell you I have two million copies going out versus one million copies going out, I'll charge you more for your ads, and if you're an advertiser you want to make sure that I'm telling you the truth. So, they pulled some resources together to form an organization that would measure, ah, audit how many copies of publications were actually making it out there into the field. And I found out about them, again, by Googling around. I think I looked for statistics on newspapers and magazines; I saw them cited a couple times (they tend to be cited by the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times). They're a pretty reliable source. Accessing their data was a bit hard. The first thing I found--I checked on the HBS databases web page, first of all, I went to the web page and I did a <control>-F for newspapers, to see if that popped up in any of the descriptions--and it did. It turns out that the school subscribes to the ABC. The issue with that, however, is that you could pull up only specific PDFs of individual audit reports. Now, I want to look at every newspaper and magazine over ten years. That would take me, probably, ten years to download individual PDFs and parse them and put them together. So, I called the president of the ABC, who was incredibly helpful. He put me in touch with a few people internally, and they were very generous. They gave me a great set of data. They aggregated it and consolidated it for me, and broke it down a couple ways that I asked. This is something that would normally be very expensive to do, and they were incredibly generous, and without that data set, this work would not be possible at all.

Q. That's fabulous. Did you get the sense that they did that as a special favor to you for how you behaved to them, because Harvard subscribes to that database, or was that unclear to you?

A. Sure, I think, I mean it really was a sympathy plea on my behalf. The first hurdle was--okay--we're a paying customer. The organization with which I'm affiliated pays you, anyways. So, intellectual property-wise (I could find out the numbers if I wanted to)--so, access-wise, that should be okay. Green light on that front. The second part was, "Look, I'm a nice kid, I'm writing a thesis, if you could help me out, that would be great. I can't do it without this work. I'll cite you, I'll credit you." They're just kind people over there. They certainly didn't have to help me. It was entirely case by case, and I think they're just generous nice folks and they did me a huge favor.

Q. Well that's wonderful. In preparing your analysis, you consulted a wide variety of publications. I noticed in your works cited you have e-books from the Harvard library collections, hard copy books from Harvard libraries, Google books; you cited free online news articles. You also found some scholarly journal articles, which I assume you obtained through Harvard's e-resources subscriptions. You cited some think tanks' and research centers' reports, and even a blog posting. So, based on your experiences with this research, do you see any connections or even differences between how you used information and how you noticed, through your study, that the general public prefers to access information?

A. Yeah, that's a good question, and to answer it well, it would require me to have a good understanding of how the general public accesses information. And if I had to think about that, the first thing I'd say is, "Well, the general public probably doesn't have access to these scholarly articles, they probably can't go into JStor. They probably can't look at some of the books I was able to pull up in the actual library, never mind any of the think tank reports or things like that." So, at gate one, I have access to more things than the general public. And even if I use the same searching methods, they'll just get different things. So, I think that's a key difference--that there are just things I had access to that other people did not, and that proved really important for my work. I think that there are some certain similarities, in that I tend to search electronically, because it's quick and it tends to work well. I also make the mistake of not reading enough longer length sources. I think my thesis could be better; I think most works could be better if people read more books, in addition to everything else they were doing on the subject . . . and there were some great books about journalism and newspapers and the art of presenting information in a publication that I wish I had a chance to read through; just for time reasons I didn't. I think that the general public probably has the same problem for time constraint reasons. One difference, I would say, besides just the raw access to information--personally, I really like to find esoteric but reliable sources of information. I think that if you look at what 95% of the world looks at, you're not going to find anything new. You shouldn't go digging in a corner where there's no credibility there. It's important that the information you get is reliable. For example, I found a science book that would talk about the differences between the way the eye perceives emitted versus reflected light, and I spoke about that in my thesis, talking about the Kindle versus an LCD screen versus a printed page. And it turns out--I think your eye perceives hue and color and brightness in a different order whether the light is reflected or emitted. Most people wouldn't encounter that, so I'm a big believer in looking in very different places for information about whatever topic you're interested in, and some of the tools I had to do that made that possible.

Q. Reflecting on your own experiences, whether good or bad, using Harvard's libraries (or any libraries), how do you perceive that libraries are grappling with the concerns over how people prefer to access information? And, can you share an example?

A. Sure. I think that we, as students, have the sense that this is a concern to which libraries and librarians are attuned. It's mentioned a lot. We see posters related to topics involved in this stuff, and there is a sense that people are talking about this issue of how people prefer to get information. And there are articles in the newspaper that mention this stuff as well, so it's on our minds. As far as what libraries are doing in response to this, you do notice some better online tools for organizing information, searching for information. There's the new HOLLIS system for finding stuff--tends to work well; I like it. Using RefWorks to manage citations is really helpful. I use that a lot. A lot of people use that. Most people find that very, very helpful. Things like Citation Linker to find scholarly articles are very helpful. Believe it or not, one of the most helpful tools that was put out by the library was an add-in for a browser that would let you--if you found yourself on the web page of a scholarly database and you weren't authenticated yet, you could right-click and log in via Harvard access [LibX]. Like, brilliant. Totally brilliant. Something so simple, but, it's the combination of the library saying, "We're great at buying subscriptions (among other things), and we realize you encounter them online through these channels. Let's just make it easier for you to do that, and step out of the way a little bit." That's super helpful, because it recognizes that you may not go through the libraries' homepage to get there.

Q. Now I'm going to ask you to speculate a little bit. I don't expect you to have the answer (in fact, it seems like nobody does), but, if broadband penetration is a significant factor in decreasing newspaper circulation and magazine sales--and you say, in fact, it's already killed the newspaper, long term--what broader implications might you foresee? For example, how might this trend affect how people conduct research in the future?

A. Well, I think that one issue you're going to find with research is finding good, probing journalism. So, the down side to the newspaper as an institution being hurt in the way it has is that they're just smaller organizations now. Their revenues are less, so you can pay for fewer journalists. You can send fewer journalists and lawyers out into the field. And part of the reason that the newspaper has been hurt is that you can get the New York Times and newspapers online, right? And mostly, for free, so why pay for a subscription? That new modality of use is something to which everyone has to adjust. But the other issue is that I don't think blogging can replace the newspaper, for example. A lot of people say, "Oh, crowd sourcing, citizen journalism--these things are great!" They're cool for some stuff, but they're not going to sue a governmental organization in D.C. and say "We need a subpoena for this information." They just don't have the means to do that, and that's really important in getting information out there.

Q. And are they going to protect their sources?

A. Exactly. These are huge issues, and as much as I love blogs, I love social media, I think they're a great way of getting information, but--your original question was, what implications does this whole broadband affect on newspapers and magazines have? I think it makes it harder for people to operate in the print world clearly, and I think it will confer a certain number of advantages--significant advantages--to people who can adjust to this new modality of use. Okay, now that we have broadband everywhere (or when we do) the information dissemination becomes trivial. The only question then is, like, what do you do with this cool technology now? Right? And you can do things with media and video and location and a social graph, and you can mash those things up with the information and hopefully create some cool stuff. I think there are going to be some interesting opportunities for taking that to the next level, and I don't think it'll make research any harder. I think it'll make it easier because with this trend towards communicating and receiving information digitally, in the background is the fact that all of this is logged and indexed and archived better than anything else we've ever had before, so I think it'll make research that much more interesting in the future.

Q. On the cover page of your thesis you thanked Harvard Business School professor Ben Edelman and Harvard economics Ph.D. candidate Joshua Gottlieb for guiding your work on this project. If you were going to ask them to pass on some advice for students following in your footsteps, who also need to learn to navigate a sea of information, what would you ask them to tell those students?

A. I would ask them to tell students to talk to people who are smarter than them. Web search tools are great, citations in the back of articles are great--the most useful searching I've done, the most time-effective searching I've done is me asking someone who is smarter than me--so whether it's my adviser or other candidates or friends or mentors or whomever--and just talking to them about this, they'll point me in interesting directions. They will know about articles or studies or people who are looking at this stuff, and those are things that are just hard to find, otherwise. Search tools are good, but they haven't nailed the relevancy yet. It's still hard to find stuff. Things are still buried, and one of the best filters for all of the information that's out there is people who have been there before in the sea of information--right? A good captain is pretty important, and there are captains that have navigated that before, and they know where the islands are and the sand bars are, and all that other stuff. Asking them directly and talking to them very early on in your research is important, and I think I wish that I did that even a bit more. It would have been helpful.

Q. Reflecting on libraries again, if you could describe your ideal library in one sentence, what would that offer?

A. I thought about this, and it's tricky. I think that the ideal library is, at once, a physical place to be and work, and also this portal to the world's knowledge that I can access anywhere.

Q. And, do you have a favorite library resource or service? You mentioned some earlier.

A. Yeah, I do. I was thinking about this walking over here this morning. And, things like Citation Linker, that right-click on a web page and have it authenticate you on the database [LibX]--those are great, those are favorites. But really--really, and no old librarian is paying me to say this, I swear: My favorite service is the periodical rack. I just like to go and look at magazines, because I wouldn't, I don't, I can't subscribe to all of them. I look at the covers and look for interesting stories and sit down and read for a little bit. I learn things that I would never encounter otherwise. So, that's actually one of my favorite parts about the libraries here.

Q. So, how do you feel, then, about Harvard libraries having to cancel so many of the print subscriptions and offering instead, netbooks in the periodicals reading room for you to access some of the latest issues?

A. Yeah, I think it's sad and unfortunate. I know electronic journals are super-expensive and there's kind of a monopoly on the space, and Harvard pays a lot of money for that, and giving you netbooks to look stuff up online is great, I think it's a great idea. But when you walk into Lamont, and there's a physical wall of magazines--and less so with scholarly articles; I think if you replace those electronically, yeah sure, whatever, I can't say I've gone in and browsed these esoteric but useful scholarly journals (that's fine, I'm not talking about those)--I'm talking about going into Lamont and saying, "Oh," you know, "Here's The Economist, here's Esquire, here is Nature, here's Scientific American," and looking at the covers and saying, "What's interesting right now?" That interaction, I don't think is costly, because I think you can get those subscriptions at a reasonable price, and I do think they're useful. And, lastly, I enjoy reading in print. I don't think that experience has been replicated entirely through other devices.

Q. Do you think the iPad has the potential to kill the magazine, as well?

A. I think it has the potential to really disrupt things. What it does is--the issue is that it's small right now. You spread out a magazine and it's pretty big; there's a lot of surface area to look at. And so, it can't replace that directly. But, if it starts taking advantage of some of the other inherent features it has--so, if now the magazines--the pictures--are actually video, that are very well integrated, that start playing when you click on them, or if they're doing things like showing you who else is reading that article at the same time and showing you your friends' comments where they were looking at this part of the page--that's interesting. And that may be enough to tip the scales. But initially I think it will be tough, just because people are used to reading a certain way. It's very nice to read in print. There's a tactile feel. The visuality of looking at something spread out that large is very important. But, if the iPad takes advantage of the technology it has--not just replicate reading it, but actually make it a more immersive and connected experience--it could totally, totally, change things, sure.

Q. Interesting, and you don't feel that people would be concerned about their privacy if all of these social features were available?

A. I think it depends on the person and it depends on who's doing it, like most things around privacy, right? I worked at the Berkman Center for a couple years when I started here, and I worked on a book called Digital Natives. And basically, they said, "Okay, people growing up now have been socialized in an entirely new way, and so the norms they have around what you share and with whom are entirely different than people who grew up before." So, a) it's normal to share your whereabouts and what you're reading--people are just used to it, and b) you can, I think you can, put the right structures in place to control the people to whom that information is broadcast. So, say, only my close friends can see that I'm reading this right now. I think people are generally okay with that, and so far, there hasn't been a huge privacy scare or many of the big people operating in the space. If that happened, that could be an issue, but even if it did, I think people would probably forget in a couple weeks.

Q. Interesting. And that was John Palfrey's book you were mentioning?

A. Yes, that's right, who was a great professor and mentor when I started off here.

Q. And if listeners wish to read your thesis, can they find it somewhere?

A. I promise by the end of the day I will put it up online. You can go to tonypino.com/thesis. I will put it up there as a PDF and you're certainly free to look at it and comment on it and e-mail me about it.

[Leslie Mathews]

This is great - thanks Ramona! I liked his one sentence description of an ideal library. Also, I am glad he likes the periodical rack!! Hmmm don't think you can get "Nature" at a reasonable price though LOL.

[Liza Vick]

Ramona, I enjoyed your first installment of research views. Love your audio theme under the intro - very professional!