the free newspaper war continues with Associated's London Lite closing November's 30,000 copy gap between it and News International's the London Paper to just 10,000 copies in December. The 50p Evening Standard is still losing sales in the wake of all this competition, but last year's price-cutting promotions are clouding accurate year-on-year comparisons: the paper is clearly still losing sales, but not on the scale of the horrifying 18% drop that the topline ABCs suggest.
Smacks of desperation
Yet the issue is not simply about free versus paid. It is also about cut-price campaigns and added-value promotions, with covermounts and giveaways having been a major factor behind many of the national newspaper circulation swings seen in 2006
There are some very good points made here about the changing nature of news and information and consumption
the newspaper business model is changing at both ends at once. The future may not be free, but free is playing a major part in shaping the future and the future is in the hands of the consumer.In that regard, here is one last and scary statistic. The broadcast regulator Ofcom recently reported that only 25 viewers complained about the screening of pictures of Saddam Hussein's execution - itself an example of "people's journalism" with some of the photos being captured on a mobile phone. By contrast, over 1,000 complaints were sparked by viewer anger over the eviction process on Channel 4's Big Brother. Giving the consumer power over the editorial product is just as explosive and unsettling as giving the editorial product away free.
Revenues rise while sales continue to slide
This is what Rupert Murdoch had to say Big media vs. The people. Rupert tells it how it is
Like many of you, I’m a digital immigrant. I wasn’t weaned on the web, nor coddled on a computer. Instead, I grew up in a highly centralized world where news and information were tightly controlled by a few proprietors, who deemed to tell us what we could and should know. My two young daughters, on the other hand, will be digital natives....The peculiar challenge then, is for us digital immigrants – many of whom are in positions to determine how news is assembled and disseminated -- to apply a digital mindset to a set of challenges that we unfortunately have limited to no first-hand experience dealing with.
We need to realize that the next generation of people accessing news and information, whether from newspapers or any other source, have a different set of expectations about the kind of news they will get, including when and how they will get it, where they will get it from, and who they will get it from.
What is happening right before us is, in short, a revolution in the way young people are accessing news. They don’t want to rely on the morning paper for their up-to-date information. They don’t want to rely on a God-like figure from above to tell them what’s important. And to carry the religion analogy a bit further, they certainly don’t want news presented as gospel.
Instead, they want their news on demand, when it works for them. They want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it. They want to question, to probe, to offer a different angle.
In the face of this revolution, however, we’ve been slow to react. We’ve sat by and watched while our newspapers have gradually lost circulation. Where four out of every five Americans in 1964 read a paper every day, today, only half do. Among just younger readers, the numbers are even worse, as I’ve just shown.
There are a number of reasons for our inertness in the face of this advance. First, for centuries, newspapers as a medium enjoyed a virtual information monopoly – roughly from the birth of the printing press to the rise of radio. We never had a reason to second-guess what we were doing. Second, even after the advent of television, a slow but steady decline in readership was masked by population growth that kept circulations reasonably intact. Third, even after absolute circulations started to decline in the 1990s, profitability did not.
But those days are gone. The trends are against us.
So unless we awaken to these changes, and adapt quickly, we will, as an industry, be relegated to the status of also-rans or, worse, many of us will disappear altogether.
We have not, as an industry, embraced digital technology and the Internet in the way … or to the extent … that we should, and must....
I venture to say that not one newspaper represented in this room lacks a website. Yet how many of us can honestly say that we are taking maximum advantage of those websites to serve our readers, to strengthen our businesses, or to meet head-on what readers increasingly say is important to them in receiving their news?
The challenge, however, is to deliver that news in ways consumers want to receive it. Before we can apply our competitive advantages, we have to free our minds of our prejudices and predispositions, and start thinking like our newest consumers. In short, we have to answer this fundamental question: What do we – a bunch of digital immigrants -- need to do to be relevant to the digital natives?
But our internet site will have to do still more to be competitive. For some, it may have to become the place for conversation. The digital native doesn’t send a letter to the editor anymore. She goes online, and starts a blog. We need to be the destination for those bloggers. We need to encourage readers to think of the web as the place to go to engage our reporters and editors in more extended discussions about the way a particular story was reported or researched or presented.
At the same time, we may want to experiment with the concept of using bloggers to supplement our daily coverage of news on the net. There are of course inherent risks in this strategy -- chief among them maintaining our standards for accuracy and reliability. Plainly, we can’t vouch for the quality of people who aren’t regularly employed by us – and bloggers could only add to the work done by our reporters, not replace them. But they may still serve a valuable purpose; broadening our coverage of the news; giving us new and fresh perspectives to issues; deepening our relationship to the communities we serve. So long as our readers understand the distinction between bloggers and our journalists, and so long as proper safeguards are utilized, this might be an idea worth exploring.
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