I love
newspapers. My shareholders would like me to get rid of them all.
Rupert
Murdoch, April 25, 2012
Who will win
what could be a fight to the death? The people with newspapers in their very
souls, or the investors whose interest in printed paper is restricted to the
kind with watermarks and £ or $ signs?
Some
publishers are already preparing to throw in the towel. The Guardian chief
executive Andrew Miller said in so many words last year that the print
edition’s days were numbered, that digital was the only future. This year he
went further, embracing the prospect of giving “citizen journalists” a place in
his company’s output. “Socialisation of media is at the heart of our future journalistic
calling,” he said.
Will his customers stay
loyal if they have to invest in a laptop or iPad before they can look at the
paper? And will they pay for content - possibly produced by amateurs? A totally unscientific straw poll of
one Guardian reader – my neighbour – came up with this response: “My first
thought is no, I wouldn’t, because I like to have an actual paper to peruse
anywhere I like – I am off to have a bath now with one, for example. However,
if it goes digital then I’ll have no choice will I? Re payment, I would expect
to pay. But I rarely read anything on
the web because it’s not as pleasant on screen.”
Circulations
may be dwindling while web hits increase, but it is an uncomfortable fact for publishers that people
like newspapers. Radio was supposed to kill them off. So was television. Then
Ceefax and Oracle. Now the internet, the elephant in Leveson’s room.
In his
evidence this week, Sky’s Adam Boulton said that the elephant was creating competitive
pressures that were threatening the viability of the print media. Politicians,
for example, were no longer dependent on
professional journalists to spread their message – they could now reach the
entire public at the click of a mouse. So if basic news could be disseminated
without the press as an intermediary, newspapers were left in a desperate search
to find something different to offer their readers.
Politicians have an axe to grind. It’s very nice for them to reach the public directly; but as battle-scarred as our profession may be, journalists are needed to question, analyse and call them to account. And in any case, how many people are going to
click on what some junior minister has to say or follow her on Twitter? Turnout at elections
doesn’t suggest a huge engagement with the political process and the MPs’
expenses scandal hasn’t exactly lifted their standing in people’s eyes.
The City University professor George Brock suggests that newspapers have to rethink the “bundle”mentality; deal with the idea that people may not want the whole package; accept
that they can get their news from other sources and may not want to pay for
features or commentary that doesn’t interest them.
I can see
where he’s coming from, but I think – hope – that he’s wrong. As an old-school
hack, it pains me to acknowledge that, other than on the really big occasions such as 9/11, news
is not the selling point it once was. It is no longer the main course, but the
hors d’oeuvres. The meat of a newspaper lies in its comment section. Features are the pudding and sport the cheese.
If people
take their news from the TV and internet, where will they get their comment,
features and sport? Magazines? There is evidence to support this theory:
newspaper circulations are falling; current affairs magazines are
prospering. The Spectator, The
Economist, The Week, The Oldie, Private Eye and Prospect are all putting on
sales.
The
Spectator sells 63,000 copies a week; The Economist 210,000; The Week 180,000;
The Oldie 41,000. Private Eye a record 228,000 a fortnight. Prospect notches up 32,000 and the New
Statesman, which doesn’t submit figures to ABC, about 24,000 a week. That’s a
combined circulation of 778,000.
Hang on,
though. Even in these dark days, nearly 10 million people in Britain buy a
newspaper every day, including Sundays. That is something under half the number
in 1950, but hardly a sign of terminal decline. We are in danger of becoming so
beguiled by trends that we ignore the hard figures. There is still a solid
market for print journalism. The big question is how to keep – and develop – it.
Trust and reliability
The first
step is to recognise what a precious commodity we have and celebrate and
promote it. All newspapers rely on building a relationship with their readers.
As George Brock points out in his “bundles” blog, it’s a question of trust. As
readers, we think we know where the paper is coming from. That doesn’t mean
everyone writing for it has a Stepford brain; the opinion columns of our
newspapers offer a range of opinion that you won’t find in the New
Statesman or The Spectator.
And if we
are to retain that trust, we must maintain the quality. But how can we do that
when every news organisation is frantically cutting costs while trying to cover every base? Under that approach it is inevitable that quality must suffer.
This was highlighted seven years ago by the
Sheffield University lecturer Adrian Bingham. His prescient paper for the History & Policy academic group on the future of the popular press pointed to the “tendency to
prize speed and short-term impact over accuracy and reliability”. The main thrust of his work was to consider the behaviour of the press and the influence historically exercised by proprietors. This was in 2005, before the News of the World published the Clive Goodman story about Prince William's knee injury that set the whole phone-hacking ball rolling. Bingham concluded that "experience suggests that the press is
unlikely to engage in a searching self-examination without some external
prompting”. Well it certainly has that now.
The Guardian’s Dan Sabbagh tweets constantly
from the Leveson hearings, and very entertaining he is, too. Then he has to
write a straight news story for the web and the newspaper, plus bits of
analysis and colour. It’s madness. How long can you keep up that sort of pace?
Reporters
have to fulfil so many roles and cover so many stories that they spend their
working days on the end of a telephone. They don’t have the time to go out and
meet contacts, build stories, follow hunches. Subs are
increasingly regarded as surplus to requirements. Across Fleet Street their
numbers are being reduced, yet they are expected to push out copy for
print, web, mobiles and tablets. You
have reporters bashing out stories and tweeting like billyo and subs scrambling
against a dozen deadlines. No one is allowed to specialise in any field in
which they have a real aptitude. Everyone must function in every sphere.
The result?
A multi-platform modern media for the digital age? No. We’re giving - or rather
selling - our readers half-researched
stories and rehashed handouts with literals in headlines, misspellings, bad
grammar, wrong pictures and captions that say ‘xxxxx cccc here please’.
And so
people lose faith in papers and stop buying them - and the decline of print
journalism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Newspapers
are so intent on promoting their digital content that they are neglecting their
reader-friendly traditional format, a format that has served for three
centuries. The blogger Fleetstreetfox
has a huge online readership, but she wanted a newspaper column. Why? To make
more money? To gain a wider audience? To have a “proper” platform for her
views? All three, she admits. She now has a weekly spot on the Mirror’s
website, but still she yearns to appear in the print edition.
Why? Because newspapers are special.
It feels good
For a start, they are tactile. You can’t curl up with a laptop in the same
way, tear out a bit to show a friend or, like my neighbour, take it into the
bath. Typing in crossword answers or numbers in a Sudoku grid isn't the same as writing them on to a paper version. Readers notice the different qualities of newsprint, the feel of the
supplements.
A printed newspaper
has a special geography and rhythm – and don’t the readers howl when it changes.
It helps the reader along. There is a hierarchy. Yes, of course the splash is
the most important story, but as you move inside, the sequence of pages, the
positioning of stories on spreads, the sidebars, the factboxes, the pictures,
the witty bottom nibs, and, most of all, the typography all indicate what the
editors think are the most important, interesting, intriguing aspects of the
day's events.
You don’t
get that on the web or iPad. Online you’ll find a main story and a series of
puffs and links, but little to indicate which the editors regard as the most
relevant or important. There is a constant pressure to update the lead, but it’s
hard for the reader to find the story that would make page 7 or 17 in the
paper. On the iPad, you may see the same stories as in the print edition, but
all the headlines are the same size, every news page is alike. The other day The Times carried a huge file picture of Adele with an armful of Grammies and a
small story saying that her 21 album had outsold Michael Jackson’s Thriller. In the
paper that would have been a nib, possibly with a picture. But on the iPad it
had the same presence as a serious political story. Can that be right?
Newspapers
don’t have to die; they have to rethink themselves. Dumbing down was the
solution of the 1990s. Today we should be wising up.
Get the mix right
News pages
should be more incisive, with more background, analysis and commentary (clearly marked as
such) on the main subjects of the day, but also with cross-fertilisation with the web, guiding readers to relevant material published in other media. At the same time, the secondary stories, the quirky and offbeat must be protected. Readers can stomach only so much war, economics and politics; it's the "everyday" stories that don't mean much in themselves but are simply interesting that newspapers do better than any other medium - the stories that don't make it to television or radio bulletins and probably don't get read on the web or iPhone. Court cases are definitely in this category - think of the old-style Telegraph page 3.
Features should be original and
home-researched, rather than based on whatever book, television programme, film
or album is coming out next week. How many interviews with Chris Martin or
Daniel Craig does one country need? But originality costs money.
Look after your regulars
Next, we need to accept that the journalists who put a paper together are not representative of the country as a whole. They need to take a wider view. Britain isn’t
a nation of yummy mummies, hoodies and grasping immigrants. We have a diverse
population, yet our papers don’t reflect it. They are written by thirty and
fortysomethings for thirty and fortysomethings and the rest of the world can go
hang. If you think I’m exaggerating, look at the preview coverage for the
latest series of Mad Men, a television programme that attracts an audience of fewer than 50,000.
The received wisdom has always been that young
readers are key. The philosophy, rather like that of the banks, has been “catch
them young and they’ll be yours for life”. The logic now is that the young can’t
be bothered to buy papers, but are digital savvy with their smartphones,
Twitter etc, so those are the formats that count. But they still buy celeb mags, don't they?
Are we
missing a trick by chasing only the young? We have an ageing population: generations that have spent their lives getting their news, puzzles, football
reports and recipes in print. Pensioners will soon account for a third of the
population. Do they want to read the
newspaper on a computer or phone? That’s a heck of a lot people to write off.
Quite a lot of Britain isn't London
Then there
is Londonitis. The UK has a population
of about 62 million, of whom about 8 million live in Greater London. Yet the
serious papers virtually ignore the 54 million in what they dismiss as the
regions or the provinces. They lump together Manchester, Birmingham and York as
though they were a single entity, treat Devizes and Hertford as though they had
the same concerns and interests. Who (apart from the Telegraph) cares about people
living in the countryside? This is a whole untapped source of readership, but
it will become more and more neglected as editorial cuts bite.
In the
1980s, The Times style was actually to byline reporters who worked outside
London with a “from” dateline as though they were in Outer Mongolia : From
Craig Seton in Stafford; From Richard Ford in Belfast. Thank goodness that has
at least stopped; and how delicious it is that the paper’s most talented
investigative reporter, Andrew Norfolk, operates not in the capital but ooop North.
Don't overcharge
Price is another issue. Royal Mail struggles to convince the public that collecting a letter posted in Hastings at 5.30pm and delivering it in Aberdeen the next morning is exceptional value for 70p. What hope, then, is there of persuading readers to part with £1.20 for a 28-page Monday broadsheet with pictures of Kate Middleton and cute wildlife, a lot of eurogloom and some football? OK, so maybe they buy. But will they do so tomorrow, and the next day? A tenner a week for a daily paper plus bumper weekend editions is quite a chunk out of a stretched household budget, especially if the business or sport or travel supplements are routinely thrown away unread. It doesn't feel like value (even though, of course, it is).
The Times price war under Peter Stothard in the 90s laid the myths that AB readers were not price-sensitive and that to reduce the price cheapened the brand. The paper's circulation flourished as it never had before or since. Today The i is doing quite nicely, thank you, at 20p.
Get rid of the ugly ads
We are told that the economics don't work for print. Newsprint is expensive, falling circulations hit advertising, which is already suffering because of the state of the general economy. That's all true, but what is missing is the will to succeed. Newspaper owners see digital as the new nirvana and print as something that they have to put up with - for now. The pride in print has all but gone. Just look at the hideous adverts of all shapes and sizes. Ads used to be confined to the corners or across the bottom of pages; now they can sit in the middle, diagonally across spreads and even occupy the top half of the page rather than the bottom. Then there are the pages cut in half vertically and the wrap-arounds that hide the real front page. They all make it so much harder for the reader to find the editorial. No one seems immune: advertisers have got the papers on the ground like a lion with a wounded zebra, and they're gorging themselves.
Learn from the Sage of Omaha
There’s no
escaping that papers are losing money. The Guardian group is haemorrhaging £40m
a year; it has cut 250 jobs and is heading down the digital highway. Sly Bailey has paid the price for the decline of the Mirror group. The Times has lost money for
as long as anyone can remember, but suddenly it is expected to become viable
and stand alone. Times and Sunday Times losses have been cut from nearly £90m in 2009 to £45m in 2010
to less than £12m last year. Why, after all these years, is there this imperative for them to pay their way?
Because of
the shareholders. As Murdoch pointed out in his comment to the Leveson inquiry at the top of this post, News Corp investors,
mostly in America, are sick of the nonsense of the newspaper industry and
particularly the hacking scandal. They are happy to take the benefits afforded
by the TV networks, film studios, blockbusters and satellite and cable, but
they are not willing to carry passengers, particularly passengers from another
country. It’s too easy to forget that this
giant multinational was built on print.
These newspaper-hating investors may care to note that none other than Warren Buffett has today signed a deal to buy 63 American papers and he's not a man renowned for backing lost causes. These are, however, local papers and he reiterated his view today that "In towns and cities where there is a strong sense of community, there is no more important institution than the local paper". (See also Why local newspapers matter.)
Please can we have a press baron?
Cost-cutting
is not the answer. Throwing everything into digital is not the answer. News
organisations need imagination and investment. They need to build on what they know
best rather than to throw away decades of experience. Of course they must embrace the new media, but there is still a place
for print and to abandon it will prove a huge mistake.
Look at the
past and you will see a legion of giant beasts of the newspaper world: Hearst,
Rothermere, Beaverbrook, Northcliffe, Murdoch, Maxwell. Maybe not people you
would want as house guests, but men with vision and passion. Maybe, like
football, newspapers need to find a new breed rich men looking for a plaything. The
old press barons were as much or more interested in power and influence than in
profit. That is off limits for now, so unless you have zillions to squander, it’s
the bottom line that counts.
So it comes
down to the Desmonds and the oligarchs? Not necessarily. Editors could reassess
the packages they produce, look to new readerships, and put forward new
strategies.
The survival of print journalism lies in the hands of the journalists.
How do you see the future of journalism? Do you still have a paper delivered or pick one up at the station on the way to work? Do you prefer print, Kindle or iPad? Or have you given up on the mainstream media and switched to Twitter and blogs? Please join in the SubScribe survey here. Thank you.
Thursday 12 May
