学进去

Transition. It’s a pleasant word and a calming concept. It means going surely and sweetly from somewhere present to somewhere future. Unless, that is, it is newspapers’ ‘transition’ to the _______ world, an uncertain and highly uncomfortable process.

Just look at the latest print circulation figures. The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian and many of the rest are down overall between 8% and 10% year-on-year, but their websites go ever higher.

All of that may well be true, depending on timing, geography and more. _______, everyone— from web academics to print analysis—says so. Yet pause for a while and count a few little things that don’t _______.

One is the magazine world, both in the UK and in the US. It ought to be _______, wrecked by the move to the tablets which fit existing magazine page sizes so perfectly. But, in fact, the rate of decline in magazine purchasing is relatively small, with subscriptions holding up strongly and advertising remarkable _______.

As for news and current affairs magazines — which you’d expect to find in the eye of the digital storm — they had a 8.4% increase to report. In short, on both sides of the Atlantic, although some magazine areas went down, many showed rapid growth.

You can discover a _______ phenomenon when it comes to books, Kindle and similar e-readers are booming, with sales up massively this year. The apparent first step of transition couldn’t be _______. Yet, when booksellers examined the value of the physical books they sold over the last six months, they found it just 0.4% down. Screen or paper, then? It wasn’t one or the other: it was _______.

So if sales in that area have fallen so little, perhaps the _______ mostly affects newspapers? Yet again, though, the messages are oddly ________. The latest survey of trends by the World Association of Newspapers shows that global circulation rose 1.1% last year (to 812 million copies a day). Sales in the West dropped back but Asia more than ________ the difference.

Already 360 US papers—including most of the biggest and best — have built paywalls around their products. However, the best way of attracting a paying readership appears to be a deal that offers the print copy and digital access as some kind of ________ package.

________, print is also a crucial tool in selling internet subscriptions. And its advertising rates raise between nine and ten times more money than online.

Of course this huge difference isn’t ________ news for newspaper companies, as maintaining both an active website and an active print edition is difficult, complex and expensive. But newspaper brands still have much of their high profile in print: a drift on the web, the job of just being ________ becomes far harder.