Piet Bakker has made it a large part of his academic career to monitor the developments on newspaper markets. This week he posted the latest analyses on recent and distant Dutch developments. The title leaves not to guess about : “Down, down, deeper and down”. As such, nothing’s new.

One interesting fact  however is that no one made a comment on the musical reference the title has. The title is of a song by the British rock band Status Quo (see the video clip of their performance on the famous Dutch show Toppop at the end of this post). Is this a generation gap between Piet, myself and the rest on the Nieuwe Reporter blog? Who knows…
Regarding a status quo and the newspaper market: As such there seems to be a large discrepancy between the status quo and the development of the numbers of newspaper copies sold in the Netherlands: i.e. down, down deeper and down. However, one could argue that there is a status quo in the decline of newspaper copies being sold. If so, the end is nigh for the printed newspapers. Which dont think will happen: no medium ever has disappeared in history. Merely their function may have changed. For now, we’ll have to wait and see patiently how the newspapers’ function will change in the coming decades.

Two chapters I co-authored were published in a book this week. The first one (Vergeer, Coenders  & Scheepers, 2009) focuses on explaining the time people spend on watching TV. The interesting point about this study that explanations are not only sought at the individual level (especially in terms of alternative ways to spend time) but also at the level of the television system (i.e. tv program diversity, number of commercial and PSB channels, the budget). The study uses multi level analysis to test the hypotheses. Here is the abstract:

This study aims to explain the variation in time spent on watching television in 15 European Union countries, using determinants defined at the individual level, and characteristics defined at the national level, such as the number of channels and nature of the television supply. The results of the multi-level analysis show that the number of channels in countries has no effect on time spent on television. Yet, the more diverse the program supply on public broadcasting channels in different countries, the less time people spend on watching television. However, this relation decreases when more commercial channels are available to watch. This suggests that EU citizens, having commercial channels as alternatives, avoid a diverse program supply in favor of commercial program supply.

The second chapter Westerik, Hollander, Verschuren & Vergeer, 2009) in the same volume, deals with community involvement and media use.

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