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It was a cold morning. I still remember the first day I took the newspaper stuck between the crevices of the big steel gates of my home. It was The Star, and the thin paper felt chalky in my hands as I brought it to my father, sipping his tea at the dining table. He had a peculiar way of reading the newspaper, in which I eventually adopted as I grew older. You see, he read the newspaper from the last page, which was the headline for the sports section. He will read the headlines and flip the pages backwards, occasionally stopping at the squash section when he sees Nicole David or Azlan Iskandar featured. He was an avid squash player, and plays it almost everyday in the morning.

He will then arrive at the business section of the newspaper, where he removes that part of the newspaper out and starts reading it from the first page, taking note of the companies that were featured and takes a glance at the stock market at the last page. He will then place the section at the side away from the main newspaper and proceeds to flip to the opinions page where several notable writers of the time chime in with their take on the current economic and political situation in Malaysia. Sometimes, he will write some notes on the newspaper or circle certain words on it as he tries to remember what is important.

That was a bygone era. Not many of us these days would buy a physical copy of a newspaper. The Gen-Zs would look at me, and be horrified at this uncle reading a physical newspaper at the kopitiam. And surprisingly, many of the physical newspapers are still being sold there and in some convenience stores. The buyers are mainly older people who still preferred to stick to the wide reading panels, taking one glance at all the headlines.

There are a myriad of reasons why people don’t read physical newspapers anymore. Let’s take a look at the main ones.

Rise of digital news and online platforms made it easier and cheaper to consume news

I think many of us knew about this. The rise in mobile platforms and online news portals made it infinitely easier for us to consume news on the go and anywhere. We no longer needed to buy a physical copy from the store or have it delivered by the person on the motorbike. I remembered it was 2011 when my father started using his smartphone to search for information and news, and he will only flip through the newspaper when the internet is slow or down (which was frequent back then). Before that, he was spending upwards to about 30 minutes reading the newspaper, but he only spent about 15 minutes doing so when online news became more prevalent.

The thing is he started to read the news only halfway through. There was just so many news to consume from many sources, so he only read the first 2 to 3 paragraphs of the ones he wanted online. I was the same too. I used to enjoy reading the newspaper through and through, reading up on all the articles and comics. However, when more news were becoming available at my fingertips, the urge to read more and more articles turned into a quick touch & go of way more articles from different sources. Before long, both my father and I were just reading news headlines online and through notifications in social media or our mobile phones.

The economics of reading news has changed significantly. News publishers no longer needed to spend massive amounts of money printing physical hard copies and for the equipment to do so. News outlets that started off digital found themselves publishing exclusively online (such as Malaysiakini and Free Malaysia Today), while the other traditional news outlet such as the Star, New Strait Times and various other Chinese newspaper (Sin Chew, Guang Ming, etc) gradually shifted their business model to publishing online.

Physical print media spiraled downwards as a main source of news, dropping to 17% in 2022 from 45% in 2017. Meanwhile, online and social media sources for news maintained its dominance at 89% and 75% respectively.

Attention Span has Declined Significantly, Making Long-Form Content in Physical Newspaper Less Popular.

8.25 seconds. That’s the estimated attention span of Gen-Zs. Millennials are not much better at 12 seconds. Both generations grew up with the digital age, and are bombarded by constant information from the online world and smartphones that it is hard to completely detach yourself from the online community. We prefer to consume information on social media such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook (maybe not Gen-Zs for FB), Tik Tok and Youtube. The information through these mediums are more interesting and touch on the senses of visual and hearing much more effectively.

I can hear my father’s generations saying things like, “Aiya, you younger generations have attention spans shorter than a goldfish. Cannot even finish reading an article.” This is true though it’s hard to find a physical newspaper copy these days so I am forced to consume online. Yes, I am quite old already. Many news outlets have also started to pivot away from long-form articles in favour of shorter ones, as there are just so much news to cover these days. Now, there are even timers on top of an article that indicates the “reading time” of the article. I have rarely seen any that exceeds 4 minutes these days. That is how much have changed in just 15 to 20 years of news consumption.

If anything, demand for traditional news consumption could be declining due to too much information

Reuters recently published this report that indicated news consumption has declined significantly in many countries as people lose trust in traditional media and some does not even consume any sort of news. Interest in news have declined from 63% in 2017 to 51% in 2022, as people actively avoided news in general and prefer to consume social media content. Tik Tok and Facebook became the preferred sources of consumption for younger and older people respectively.

Traditional news industry would need to change with the times in delivering content and news that suits the changing preferences and demand of its readers. Many dislike the long, difficult-to-understand and too-much-information news that are still the bread and butter of many traditional news and prefer to just consume news through looking at a screen or their mobile phones.

We just don’t read that much anymore, and prefer to watch videos or Tik Toks about it. That is actually bad news for me as a writer then. Better get that Tik Tok video out ASAP!