Are web hits the lifeline that newspapers need?

I was interested, no, shocked, to read Roy Greenslade’s blog that outlines Vin Crosbie’s thoughts on his Digital Deliverance blog and his thoughts on the future of the US media.

More than half of the 1,439 daily newspapers in the United States won’t exist in print, e-paper, or website formats by the end of the next decade. They will go out of business. The few national dailies - namely USA Today, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal - will have diminished but continuing existences via the web and e-paper, but not in print. The first dailies to expire will be the regional dailies, which have already begun to implode…

In part, I agree; the future of regional newspapers seems dire, especially following Trinity Mirror’s announcement of further cutbacks and redundancies.

But hang on a minute! We all know about the demise of print but aren’t the national newspaper sites going great guns on web traffic? Indeed, Roy’s own Guardian was lauding its fantastic result of increasing its monthly website traffic by a massive 2.5 million “readers” in July! What’s the problem there? Lots of interest ergo more advertising … but does it? Ninety-five million visitors to national newspaper websites seems very healthy; indeed this is more than the population of the UK and therein lies the problem….

While many regional sites have massive audiences, including Northcliffe’s regional network, who are focusing on SEO (even to the extent of designing their headlines to benefit SEO) as a way to bump up visitors and therefore add revenue. At the same time, many regional newspaper groups are cutting back on journalists.

The result is that we have a clash with the readers’ interests and the “black hat” techniques of SEO merchants. One has to ask, do the visitors of these websites actively read the content or do they decide it’s not for them? Will the lack of engaging and interesting content, due to the lack of journalistic resource, mean that they seldom come back?

In addition, where are these readers coming from? Many SEO techniques drive large amounts of international traffic, especially regionally from the USA where many towns are named after ours in the UK. Should we be chasing international eyeballs with regional / national content?

And here lies the crunch question (the one the advertiser asks first): Are your readers my target audience? At the end of the day, someone from the USA is not going to buy a house / car in the UK, are they?