The Turkish Press Has Taken Its Last 'Breath'!

Mehmet Yaşar Durukan Neafoni Editor haber@neafonia.com As a journalist with 38 years of experience and a former bureaucrat at the Press Advertising Agency, I say that the era of printed newspapers in Turkey has long been over. The printed newspaper no longer has a sociological counterpart. So why will Nefes be printed on paper? The managers of Nefes consider printed newspapers as the main medium of media, akin to television. This perspective may be partially true for television channels, but in my opinion, printed newspapers are not the main medium of the media. FACEBOOK REACHED RURAL AREAS BEFORE NEWSPAPERS In 2010, as the General Directorate of the Press Advertising Agency, we commissioned a public opinion poll. A large segment of the audience responded “Facebook” to the question, “Where do you read the news?” I was very surprised by this answer and investigated it for many years. The result: people do not buy and read newspapers but follow news in the online environment. News is always a necessity. Editors of online news sites know this very well: If you don’t post the link to the news on Facebook and Twitter after publishing it, the reading rate of the news remains very low. The only way to increase circulation and click rates is to share the news on social media. Social media has reached rural areas before newspapers, causing newspapers to lose their chance of being read. NEWSPAPERS ARE READ BY PEOPLE OVER 65 YEARS OLD So, which age group reads newspapers? My estimate, observation, and non-scientific research suggest that newspapers are primarily read by those over 65. A very small portion of this elderly group reads newspapers, and this group continually declines due to deaths. In today's world, given that paper and fuel are very expensive, printing newspapers is a very, very costly endeavor. So why do press enterprises incur this cost? Why do newspapers continue to arrive at retailers every day? Are newspapers making a profit? Before the internet, the greatest income for newspapers came from advertising revenues. After the internet, advertising shares rapidly declined. Newspapers lost their share of the advertising pie to the internet. Thus, in today’s world, selling newspapers to citizens and relying on revenue from that to sustain a newspaper is not viable for survival.