A lot has been mentioned of "television's threat to print". Fact is that both media are evolving rapidly along with the dynamic marketplace - a la Darwin's principle of "survival of the fittest".

The Print Medium
As the historical genesis of the media industry, the print medium still holds center-stage in the industry. Successfully thwarting strong competition from the rapidly growing television broadcast business. While expanding continuously.

Predictions that television and new media would hamper growth of print seems unfounded - India for example, has seen its number of newspapers grow by 7 % p.a. in the last decade (culminating in over 40,000 registered dailies). And the growth in overall circulation is estimated to match this figure. Predictions that television would hamper print is also a case of history repeating itself : in the 1930s, the telephone was seriously promoted as a rival medium to radio - its "dial a song" services was supposed to make a dent in the radio audience; and a little earlier, the advent of television was expected to kill radio !

Everybody knows that the number of TV households including those with cable & satellite (C&S) connections has been growing at a scorching pace. In India, well over half the total number of households own a television set with a quarter owning cable & satellite connection.

As noted earlier, despite this, the gross and average circulation figures of reporting dailies suggests that newspaper circulation is on the rise.

Television's Threat
So where is the threat from television, really? To put it simply, it is in sharing of advertising budget. The share in adspend of the print media has been declining steadily since the past few decades. Today, on a global scale this share is estimated to be around 40%. It was this that magnified the "threat perception" of television. Let us analyse :

To begin with, advertising revenues of regional newspapers have been eating into that of national dailies!

Secondly, there is a clear trend is that publications have started changing their revenue models (which was earlier completely dependent on advertising revenues). This is belied by the recent marked efforts to augment newspaper revenues with cross promotion tie-ups. (This is a general reflex action of the print medium to the threat of television by emulating the basic planks of the television medium - "entertainment" & "promotion based on sales-revenue-sharing".)

A third development is that television's acknowledgement of the traditional advantage of print medium which addresses individual segments of the vast regional, linguistic, socio-economic & cultural fabric. And what's more, television is making concerted efforts to emulate this - by creating region/city specific content with individual broadcasts.

Further, television has accepted the print medium's superior distribution model based on revenue, by changing its free distribution policy by modifying its "free-to-air" / "free-to-cable-operator" distribution policy with "direct-to-home" / "revenue-sharing with cable operators".

Survival of the Fittest
In reality, it appears that both print as well as television are "learning" from each other by embracing some characteristics of each to survive the new challenges !
The general trend of both media seems to be to rely less on direct advertising revenues - which is sure to make each one more competitive.
All this portends well for both media - since the most adaptable are the fittest for survival.