Traditional print media has been taking a bit of a hammering now for the past couple of years. Circulations are way down and advertisers are taking the dollars elsewhere to getting better return on their money and to engage consumers in more interactive ways. Just last year newspaper circulations were down 30%, a huge amount for such an important industry that has helped to shape opinion and influence millions of us over the years. We look at a combination of the factors that have caused this decline and see if we can find any short term solutions for an industry that is on it’s knees at the moment. The biggest problem is that producing quality news costs money, professionally trained journalists and the infrastructure that they need to help them report are all costly and in order to be supported and for the medium to continue the industry needs to find additional revenue models outside of advertising and find them very fast. Here are some of the reasons why the print industry is struggling followed by some of the possible ways it might get out of the mess…

Challenges Facing The Print Industry

The Challenges facing this industry range from changes in the way we lead our lives to the technology that we use and have adopted over the last few years with the pace of change accelerating…

Changing Lifestyles

Most of us lead lives that are incredibly busy and we have very little time to spend sitting down to read a newspaper any more. Our work hours are spent glued to a computer completing tasks and even commutes and breaks have now been filled with smart phones like iPhones and Blackberries that mean we are always connected to the office. The couple of hours that we do have off in the evening are spent looking after children, washing clothes, socializing and doing all the other menial jobs that require our attention. As our lives have become busier we have been forced to digest our news in smaller bite sized pieces mostly online leaving little time to sit down with the newspaper.

Technology

This is the obvious one and the main contributing factor to less and less newspapers and magazines being consumed and combined with the reason above is the main factor in circulations being slashed in recent years. Since the introduction of broadband, smart phones and news content on demand our appetite for newspapers has shrunk dramatically. The smart newspapers are online and provide better content than they do offline supplementing it with things like online video and other rich media content that would be impossible in the offline world. Too many articles end up being used as fish and chips wrapping instead of being online forever and generating cash from ads in the long term while remaining searchable content.

Better Advertising Elsewhere

It’s not just that other platforms have emerged to attract the eyeballs of consumers but better advertising has also emerged on these platforms to help engage consumers in a way that newspapers and magazines never could have. As consumers have been bombarded with advertising we have become more attuned at filtering it out ourselves so half page spreads in newspapers are not what they used to be and just can’t compete with the ROI on more innovative and engaging forms of advertising that are being developed online at the moment.

5 Possible Solutions

Many smarter people than me have been trying to find solutions for the last few years to increase revenues and breath life back in to this flagging industry but to a large extent they have failed up until now. Nobody knows if there will be one definite solution, many smaller revenue models or even the unthinkable…no long term revenue model…

Apple Tablet

This mythical device has been talked about for the last year and should finally arrive with us in less than 10 days. Apple are famous for revolutionizing whole industries and the chances are they might try to do what they did to the music and telephone industries with print media. The tablet is rumored to be a large screen that would be ideal for viewing magazines and newspapers possibly in an entirely new format online. Consumers have been used to getting content for free online for a long time and that model will be very hard to change but if anybody can do it Apple might just be the company that could convince us that paying for nicely presented content would be the way forward. Newspaper apps have already seen some success in the iPhone app store with The Guardian App seeing 70,000 downloads in it’s first week so there is already a small amount of traction in this market and the bigger screen and new features will certainly help. The initial problem will be that Apple’s market share will be tiny because of the price but if they can nail the model many other manufacturers will copy and it could just be the golden ticket traditional media needs to get it out of jail.

Micro Payments

This is one area that is under development at the moment. Many newspapers either currently have or have at least played with subscription models in the last 5 years but to a large extent putting all of your content behind a paid wall has not worked for them. The idea of a micro payment is that you would thanks to technology be able to leave a small payment (lets say 10 cents per article) on individual stories that need payment to unlock them. The majority of content that publications produce would still be free but the quality stuff from pad journalists would require small payments with the logic being that people would have no problem spending small amounts to access content. The platforms might also change with the content sitting on other sites such as Facebook with the micro payments coming through one central account. This model would work especially well with video or other rich media content.

Focusing On The Local

One area where I see massive growth is local media as we all lose our sense of community due to our busier lives and the rise of local listing services and content that is hyper local in focus. We are seeing services like Google, Twitter and Foursquare focus in on the local markets as they target the advertising dollars of smaller businesses hoping to attract customers and newspapers and publications should be looking at supporting those business models with content focused on local markets. The smaller publications are never going to be able to compete with their larger rivals for advertising models and the fact that they can focus on local content might just be to their advantage.

Embracing The Community

You only have to look at some of the success The Telegraph have had using social media (% of their traffic already comes from social media sources) and the publications that tap in to citizen journalism have a huge advantage. At the moment news stories that break on social media sites like Twitter can have a messy feel to them with traditional media usually needed to add some verification and comment to the stories. We may see a newspaper or publication move in to this vacuum where news is sourced the community (think flip cams, twitter etc) and brought together in one central place with insight and validation being added in one central portal. Getting the community involved could be the making of newspapers but finding the right revenue model and way of integrating that content will be the challenge.

Back Murdoch In The Search Engine Battle

For those of you living under a stone for the last 6 months Rupert Murdoch has been jostling with Google about blocking all of his content (he pretty much runs large parts of the media in UK and USA). The motive behind these actions is of course to try and force Google’s hand and possibly get Bing involved so as he can make additional revenues from his content. It really is not clear where this battle is headed but one thing for certain is that Murdoch is one of the smartest media operators in the world and the battle over revenue models for the entire industry lies very firmly on his shoulders. This battle has a way to run but it’s outcome will shape the print media industry for many years to come. Watch this facinating interview with Murdoch (on one of his own channels obviously) for some insights in to his thoughts…

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