‘We’re for having a go’ says the Courier-Mail (or presumably insert name of your local News Limited tabloid) house ad… and so I am. About them devoting a whole page to self promotion and then having 20 of a 104-page issue in mono or spot.
No matter that is what the 20-year-old presses were built for. I’m told each of the Murarrie presses is now capable of 96-pages of back-to-back four-colour, but add eight pages to the book and suddenly there’s 20 without process colour. Grey days for readers who don’t have a non-Murdoch alternative.
Lose the non-colour units, guys, or upgrade them (or go for two runs). Scarce readers see life in full colour these days.
That said, the 16-page promotional preprint – which opened to an edge-glued super-panorama six broadsheet pages wide – was nice. Something for advertisers to think about.
Meanwhile, News risks annoying its regular readers by bidding for a double-dip: Ian Shedden’s report in the Australian of the APRA awards tells readers they can go to the website for the full winners list… a ‘premium content’ feature for which you need a digital pass.
A sore point at GXpress, as News has decided it’s too hard to bundle print and digital subscriptions for readers who don’t live in traditional delivery areas. We buy the Oz (and the Courier-Mail) on a subscription from News Queensland, which ‘delivers’ it to the newsagent (who doesn’t do home delivery)… all of which is too much for the computers at News circulation’ department.
And the APRA award winners? Well there’s no shortage of sites which have the information free.
Paywalls were a recurring topic at the World Newspaper Congress in Bangkok this month, but one thing speakers were unanimous about was that you don’t charge for ‘commodity’ news.
All of that apart, it’s good to see the start of a new era with the launch of the New Newscorp – cashed up and with an $8.1 billion market valuation – as GXpress goes to press.
There’s a need for a realisation that newspaper businesses are still good businesses, even if some market segments are smaller than they were. Australia’s The Newspaper Works makes a valid point with an online ad which reads, “If you’re reading this... you’re in the minority”. It quotes figures which put ‘attention paid to advertising’ in newspapers at 26 per cent, against eight per cent for online ads.
In Bangkok, Singapore Press Holdings’ Patrick Daniel told WNC delegates, “We’ve looked around and found it hard to find a business as profitable as newspapers.” A quote to remember.
John Engisch enjoys a good yarn, but the best story is often his own. From the days when angry readers fire-bombed the offices of his family’s Torch newspaper in Bankstown – “a part of life at any suburban newspaper”, he says – to his own personal struggle with cancer and the after-effects of a sailing accident in which he “forgot to duck”, fracturing his skull.
During sick leave, he’s been busy building a herd of 45 belted Galloway cattle on a property near Goulburn.
Chatting at the SWUG Australia conference – for which he’s a committee member – he told me how he had found an avid listener at a recent event last year, who then stopped him with, “hang on while I get my recorder”.
Suddenly he had a much bigger audience as it turned out Ian McNamara – Macca to his many ABC radio listeners – was capturing the story. The broadcast went out the following morning, but is on the programme’s podcast site.
Working on your laptop is one thing, but will working on a lap-top be the next, as publishers move to what is being called hot-desking or ‘real time working’?
Basically the idea is that you come into the office, check your gear in or out of a smart locker… and find somewhere to sit.
The pay-off for your employer is that it saves the expense of providing dedicated desk accommodation for journos and others who are out on a job. Fairfax Media is among those working on the idea, and expects to save tens of millions by sub-letting space at its biggest offices in Melbourne’s Docklands and Sydney’s Darling Island.
In Melbourne last month for PacPrint, I realised they have a potential solution: Empty former Fairfax buildings.
Travelling from the airport to my hotel I passed the soon-to-be-sold Age Print Centre, and then walking from the exhibition centre to my hotel, passed not only the current offices on the corner of Collins Street, and further up the still empty 250 Spencer Street, where the Age presses once roared.
A $5 snip in the remainder bin had me re-reading parts of Bruce Guthrie’s spume-filled autobiography, Man bites Murdoch over the holiday. But it leaves more questions than it answers.
Like why the faithful hound chewed up The Age, the day after he left the paper, while leaving the Herald Sun and the Oz intact? Soy ink? Recycled newsprint? Or had it been sabotaged with meat gravy?