DECLINE OF THE NEWSPAPER INDUSTRY
The much-talked-about decline of the newspaper industry has serious implications for communications professionals, says Ruth Sunderland, editor of Observer Business and Media:
We’re all familiar with the notion that dead trees are so over – the print newspaper business, if not dying out, is certainly contracting dramatically. The pace of change is stepping up as the structural shift to the internet combines with the credit crunch in a lethal cocktail for old print media. The death knell has already sounded with ominous regularity for titles in the US, and, closer to home, there has been fevered speculation over the future of my own paper, The Observer, and others.
The implications for those of us working in the news industry are far-reaching; equally so for those in the communications business. Cost-cutting is the order of the day, meaning there will almost certainly be an exodus – both voluntary and involuntary – of experienced staff from newspapers; that means not only a loss of accumulated knowledge, but also the loss of long-standing relationships between journalists and companies. If these veterans are replaced at all, it tends to be with younger, less knowledgeable reporters, and the seasoned journos who remain may be stretched more thinly, with less time to absorb detail, complexity and nuance.
Coupled with the compression of the news schedule, it adds up to a situation where it will be trickier for comms professionals to get messages across. The disappearance of the traditional deadline means there is less time to deal with breaking news, in particular bad news, which can rapidly mutate into crisis. The democratisation of news also poses challenges. Newspapers – or their online equivalents – will have more direct interaction with readers, making it far easier for complaints to gain traction. The same applies to social media such as Facebook where user campaigns have already provoked corporate reactions, such as Cadbury’s decision to backtrack on plans to scrap Wispa bars after a backlash on the site. The changing media landscape opens up opportunities too – perhaps most obviously, the chance to poach some talent from the newspaper industry itself and to hire individuals with a real insight into journalists’ changing needs.
“If the era of dead trees is dead, getting your message out will become a whole lot trickier”
Newspaper managements are looking at a range of ideas, including subscription clubs, where loyal members are prepared to pay for a range of content and services; charging for specialist sites such as business or sport; micropayment systems where users are charged a small fee for clicking on to content; or putting commodity news on the web, and reserving print for more ‘magazine’ style content such as features and commentary.
Whether it will be possible, as Rupert Murdoch hopes, to erect a paywall around information that users have become accustomed to getting for nothing, remains to be seen. As media commentator and former Guardian editor Peter Preston has observed, the future is likely to involve more ‘engagement’ for media groups: defining who they are, and what they are trying to offer their own unique audience.
Despite the rapid changes, it would be unwise to write the obituary of the newspaper prematurely. Many people, particularly the over-35s, see their paper as an important component of their personal brand: for a businessman, tucking an FT under the arm of his Savile Row suit is a subliminal piece of image-building; for an academic, a copy of Guardian on the desk conveys a message about who she is and what she stands for. That doesn’t change overnight: I reckon there is life in those dead trees yet.
