The newspaper market in the UK and Europe – where the World Publishing Expo was held in Frankfurt – provides a contrast to that in the Asia Pacific or Americas (writes Peter Coleman).
Of developed markets, it stands between the still relatively modest losses of Australasia and the self-inflicted disaster of the USA. Publishers are nonetheless haemorrhaging from reader and advertiser loss.
Travel by public transport in London – and I did a lot of that in the week before the WPE – however, and you’ll see plenty of people reading printed newspapers. Free newspapers, from Metro and the transformed London Evening Standard, to the locals. Bright, breezy ones like Trinity Mirror’s The Wharf – the Docklands paper which sometimes deprecatingly calls itself The Worf – and the focussed City AM.
Nor is it because of the convenience of tabloid publication. All the national ‘heavies’ published in London have now resorted to tabloid, with the exception of The Guardian, which revels in a stylish Berliner format and its compact quarterfold.
In Frankfurt during the three days of the WPE, you’d have seen a slightly different picture. The papers being read in trains are typically paid sale, and frequently editions of highly regionalised dailies. These are the publications whose specific needs are driving the sales of highly-automated newspaper presses, just at a time when the rest of the developed world has turned into a press salesman’s desert.
At the Frankfurter Rundschau plant in Neu Isenburg, 20,000 copies a day (of various titles) are individually inkjet-addressed for mailing. But is the process an “expensive” necessity (as I was told) or an opportunity missed of using digital printing to deliver a more tailored and personalised message?
It’s not all good news of course: The regional publisher whose technologically-advanced plant I visited during WPE, filed for bankruptcy a couple of weeks after I got home.
Back in the Noosa hinterland, where GXpress exploits the available technology to print in New South Wales and publish worldwide, I caught up with key reading, but questioned my commitment to printed daily newspapers which looked grey and dull.
Mark Day’s three-page analysis of the future of newspapers in The Australian Magazine included his own experience of a week without printed papers. He missed them, but I had found a daily diet of Fairfax’s (still free) Sydney Morning Herald app and occasional delves into online sections of theaustralian.com.au adequate for the time available.
Of the pile of newsprint that can easily accumulate, I make a point of pulling out APN’s biweekly Noosa News: It’s superbly printed, conveniently stapled, and includes content I can’t so readily browse in another format.
My previous ‘local’ before moving from New South Wales, News’ Central Coast Express Advocate was also a strong product, sufficiently so to largely frustrate Fairfax’s plans for a local edition of the daily Newcastle Herald.
And as a ‘push’ format, both presented me with marketing opportunities – typically in the (glossy) real estate and motors sections – I would not otherwise seek out. Editorial is unashamedly local, as it is for UK regional the Kent Messenger – which I looked up during my stay, and to which I had sold a couple of community titles a quarter of a century before.
At all levels, the classified ‘rivers of gold’ may have dried up – at least in terms of the columns of linage ads which have defected to internet search sites – but display advertisements in these ‘classified’ sections still flourish. Which is why publishers resist calls to allow readers the opportunity to pick up only the sections they want from newsagents.
And newspapers continue to be an effective way to sell new cars. Witness the dramatic print presentations (such as KBA customer Mediengruppe Main Post’s elaborate Mercedes-Benz gatefold) which still make news in these columns.
The basics of ‘push’ and ‘pull’ marketing seem to be something news publishers are still coming to terms with online, although they have been a fact of commercial life for print publishers for centuries.
And in the harsh world of internet competition, it’s a critical lack.
Free community and commuter newspapers push, and do so with a cost model which differs substantially from that of paid-sale national and metro dailies (which are the ones reeling from the loss of revenue they should never have taken for granted).
The Metros, Standards of this world and – in the Asia Pacific – mX in Australia and Hong Kong’s Sing Tao Daily – are generally doing nicely, thank you. In part because distribution costs have been pared down to strategic placement in central underground and railway station bins (an efficiency not possible in Bangkok, apparently, where they would be stolen for their recycling value).
And partly because publishers who control distribution numbers can also control print costs and demand.
The once upmarket (and still aspirant) London Evening Standard, rescued from oblivion by former KGB man Alexander Lebedev and his son, survives because of its bold free distribution since 2009.
Another print success from the UK capital is that is the compact edition of the Independent, i which retails for only a few pence.
In regional areas, the concept of weeklies with a mix of paid and free circulation is commonplace. Pick-up points in high traffic areas deliver wanted circulation near offices and shops, while subscribers who may be less attractive to advertisers pay to have ‘the local’ delivered to their home.
Is it far-fetched to imagine that such a model might figure in the future of stressed metropolitan publishers… at least in the future of the one which comes to mind, currently focussed on plans for the day when its print editions will cease?
At the same time, online news publishers need to know their audience at least as well as the giants of the ad-pitching industry, Google and Facebook do. And bring something extra to the table, as TMG does with streaming video and Kent Messenger with FM radio.
In Australia, both Fairfax and News are bent on excising unprofitable copies from their print and distribution costs, while working to get to know both print and online readers better. News’ T2020 home delivery rationalisation has hit predictable opposition from newsagents, but is the way ahead, catching up on centres such as Fairfax’s Canberra Times, which have been handling delivery for years.
As it evolves – and with the no-brainer consolidation of deliveries for multiple publishers – the ‘technology searching for a business model’ of digital newspaper printing becomes more of an opportunity.
But with or without it, the ‘push’ model of focussed printed newspapers would appear to have a brighter future than it is frequently credited with.
• Reprinted from GXpress Magazine, November 2012
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