The life and death of newspapers

December 2nd, 2009

20th Century fingers in the media dyke of the 21st Century – I have been noticing a little groundswell of articles around the fact that The Northumberland Gazette owned by Johnston press will start charging for online content. And the BBC covered the story today

Apparently,

Johnston Press says it produces valuable content and is not getting sufficient value from giving it away free on the internet. It is widely accepted in the industry that online advertising revenues are not covering the costs of the gathering the news and various media organisations are exploring ways of redressing the balance.

Last chance saloon more like. In fact this leaves me somewhat depressed, because the really clever people still have not worked out that advertising as we once knew it, no longer exists. The story of the poor lady that was an editor of a Johnston Press newspaper, then told that she had to run 3 newspapers and then 5 of the buggers, because of budget cuts, had a nervous breakdown, sort of says it all. A couple of years ago at Preston University I was part of a discussion about Journalism and the economics of newspapers. The Johnston Press had just recently endowed a chair there. I don’t know its a bit like. “the lights are on but you’re not home” syndrome.

The JP through all this (like the others) has continued to sell advertising the same online as it does in its newspapers, using the same content as it has in its printed versions, a mirror image if you will. So steeped are these organisations in the systems of display that they are unable to think the unthinkable, to go where others have never been before – I would go so far as to say that the JP board failed to steer a once highly profitable company through the challenges of the networked society. [1] because they would not listen, and [2] because they were not prepared to do the hard yards of understanding adaption of a business model relevant to its time. So, were I to be a bank or a institutional investor I would want to know why that was!

Something I posted about at length in Advice for regional news groups in the networked economy. Have we fallen out of love with mainstream media? The land of churnalism as described by some? And I don’t think this is an issue about purely about free – I suggest its about quality and context. And when the shit hits the fan its time to innovate. The Tour de France was invented to sell more newspapers… I am not saying we have a Tour de Britain… but what I am saying is, a bit like when Napster was shut down 57 million people were sharing files I would want to dig into why people were sharing – and again it is not about FREE.

The revolution we are in is a communications revolution, as we are renegotiating how we want to conduct and live our lives from the minute we wake up to the moment we go to bed. If your business does not flex and adapt your dead. I don’t see many scribe shops on the high streets these days.

In Do not mourn the death of local newspapers, I wrote,

Polly Toynbee suggested the creation of community trusts that could take the money from the ropey reporting of ITV, combine that with the BBC regional TV budget, aided by other subsidies and build good local, independent community journalism. What a sensible idea. Advertising, interruptive, banner advertising is dead like a DODO – This company has had 5+ years to really look hard at the engineering of what advertising looks like – the avoidance of mobile platforms and dynamic data flows, revenue sharing etc., Demonstrates that a siege mentality has taken over

And I argue that news owners must focus on the core product – good journalism, and good writing writing, whilst working very hard at exploring what news and reporting looks like in the 21st Century and how one creates greater value for advertisers as a consequence. Trust is also of paramount importance. But its not a tweak of the dial. New technologies of cooperation either web-based or mobile based offer a fantastic opportunity.

But - what eventually evolves from this current process of creative destruction, will be the birth of a model; more attuned and purpose built for our era – as Wassily Kandinsky once said

Every work of art is a child of its time.

And if we value local democracy and local newspapers to support that, then – we should think deeply as to how we finance and support that child. There is a duty to explore economic models for newsbrands and work out what newsbrands of the 21st Century really look like, how they work and how they function. Sadly it did not have to be this way.

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