Comment: What price your evening Newspaper?

How much do you value your local Evening Newspaper. 
Do you still read it. 
Do you value it. Would you miss it if 
it wasn't there?

These are all questions the regional press has wrestled with for years. The gradual decline in press readership has been with us for decades. (Peak UK newspaper readership was in 1946/7). Its been falling every year since.  The regional press has withstood the onslaught of commercial TV and radio, mass delivery free newspapers, 24/7 news channels, hyper local magazines and now local TV too in some places. Throughout all of this your local daily has remained steadfastly the champion of local news delivery and  they are still largely respected and valued in their communities. 

But consider this. When was the last time you actually bought your local paper? The answer to that is probably some time ago, or at least less frequently than you did.

The sad truth of the matter is that you don't need to buy it anymore. Just a few short years ago when you were buying a car or house, or looking for a new job, you had to buy the local paper. That's where everything was and whether you wanted to or not you had little option but to purchase your local rag. 

Publishers balanced the books by continually adding a penny or two to the cover price to mitigate the fall in sales and reduction in ad revenue (remember when there were 20 pages of job ads each week - now there are often none) and as recently as 6 years ago were under the (deluded) impression that all of this was cyclical and that all the ads would come back! Head. Bucket. Sand. This of course is not and never was true. Something else has happened and that is, of course, the internet. With the benefit of hindsight publishers were ridiculously slow in understanding what it meant for them and still haven't truly been able to mortise their own digital offerings.

The crux of the problem is this. Publishing business models are fundamentally still print focused in their make-up. 80% of revenue still comes from print revenue, either advertising, or cover price revenue. That revenue pays for the editorial resource necessary to produce quality print and now increasingly on-line news. And if people were still buying newspapers in enough volume, that model would still work. The sad reality is that they're not. Newspaper sales drop by around 10% each year - with the resulting impact on the bottom line, whereas digital advertising revenue isn't growing at nearly the same pace - although it is gathering some momentum now.

The reaction to this is to bridge the revenue gap by putting up the price of the papers even more. Cover price increases are no longer 1 or 2p. They're 5...10...15....20p. This of course accelerates sales decline still further and puts even more pressure on the digital teams to catch up by contributing more. Talk about a vicious circle!

The fundamental difficulty is of course that internet news (including the papers own web content|) is largely free. The conversation about whether or not to put pay-walls up continues to do the rounds, but the horse has bolted. Why pay for something that is widely available free of charge?

You may not have noticed but in many cases what you read in your daily papers has already appeared on the papers own website the day before. Newspapers rarely 'break' news anymore - after all, they are only printed once a day and so have to be extremely fortunate to get to a big story first, and even if they do, by the time they hit the streets, we all know the story anyway. In many cases newspaper purchasers are literally reading 'yesterdays news today'.

Subscriptions will go some way to slowing the decline so long as the proposition is truly worthwhile. Publishers relentlessly knock on doors and sign readers up to a three month reduced price sale with the promise of a free fridge magnet or some such, and when they get the gift, most of this largely non committal subscribers leave and have to be signed up again. Better quality subscription offers will help, where there really is a long -tern and genuinely rewarding benefit for the customers as part of an overall membership package that is truly worth paying for. 

But really here we're simply speaking to the hardcore, mostly older and habitual readers that would have bought the paper in any case. When was the last time you saw a teenager reading a newspaper? The loyal readership base is quite literally dying and not being replaced by anyone new.

Editorially, papers still have a lot to offer other than the immediacy they can no longer provide - depth, analysis, background and back stories. There are still plenty of people who want the whole story and not simply a quick bite that we're all used to getting from the web. 

Internet teams have also made the horrible (but understandable) mistake of driving web traffic by publishing lots of vacuous click baiting nonsense - list of your 10 favourite cup cakes anyone? Traffic is all - you need to be able to tell advertisers that x thousand of readers came your way yesterday and therefore that's the web page you need to advertise on. You get what you pay for and if you're not prepared to pay for your local paper to retain skilled editorial staff then free lists it will be, combined with the hated UGC (user generated content), which is essentially my mum sending in and having published 50 words on last weeks flower arranging meeting together with a picture she took herself. As i said you get what you pay for,or not in this case.

Think of it this way. You can still buy vinyl records. You can still travel by horse and cart if you want to, but unless more people go out and buy them, at some point - not today or next week, but definitely at some point soon, you're going to have to do without your daily newspaper. It may still exist in some format - perhaps moving weekly for example. The economics of running a publishing operation without the backbone of mass circulation revenue to support the free internet simply doesn't stack up. Newspapers are not a public service. Readers cant simply expect them to be there each day.

So, would you miss them if they weren't there? Our natural reaction is to say yes - and of course, it would be a shame. But then, I can't buy a Rover or an MG anymore either. Things change and we move on and the internet, more than anything else since the first newspaper was published however many hundreds of years ago has changed the game, relatively speaking, almost overnight.

If you keep up to date with the views of newspaper staff, you'll see that generally speaking the blame is laid firmly at the door of management - as though somehow its all their fault that costs need to be pruned. As an (ex) member of 'the management' I can tell you that none of these things were ever taken lightly. We'd all love there to be as many snappers as there ever were, as many branch offices, as many sub editions of the core paper, but to blame the managers for the fact that none of these things are possible is simply missing the point. The revenue isn't there to support any where near the number of staff that we used to employ. My own company used to have 1200 employees, now it has 200. I can understand the frustration and its amazing that those left still produce the quality of content that they do but the reality is that there is only enough revenue to support 200. So none of the things you miss will be coming back. Revenue generation and sales haven't declined because those things have gone. Those things have gone because they didn't add any tangible value anymore. If you're of the view that we understand the price of everything, but the value of nothing, well, its a company. It has to earn money. Regional publishers aren't charities.

Its actually quite sad to read that a paper has a new editor and they've re-launched with a front page redesign. Wow!. Why does anyone think that will make a difference. I wonder how many people popped into a newsagent (in Brighton in this case) and thought - that paper looks like it had its front page redesigned, Id best buy it? Very few I suspect. I've lived through many front page re-designs and the sad fact is, one week in I can never remember what it used to look like, whats changed now and and why anyone thought it would make a difference.


And the answer is? Well more of the same I'm afraid. I read the headlines for today's Telegraph on Twitter (last night) and their website without any need to actually buy the product. Didn't cost me a penny. The fact that I, (but not most consumers I suspect), realise that the staff writing the content are largely paid for by ever-decreasing print sales is a conundrum I'm not nearly clever enough to solve - and I'm not alone in that.

The fact is that we're experiencing a period of accelerating an unremitting change and few of us like change.Those of us still championing local papers are clip clopping along on our horses and carts and the Veyron that is free content on the web has just sped past. Its a shame, but there we are.

Generating significant revenue without the need to print newspapers. Thats the answer.



A note about the author: I worked in the regional press for 30 years until the axe fell in my direction around Christmas 2014. This doesn't mean I have an axe to grind, simply that I now have the opportunity to look from in from the outside at an industry that has been a major part of my working life.