Source: theguardian.com
Orange County Register shocked the crisis-stricken industry with an ambitious experiment. One year later, the paper is celebrating Conventional media wisdom posits several ways for a newspaper to commit suicide. It can drive up costs by multiplying staff and pagination. It can prioritise print over digital. It can erect a hard paywall to seal itself from the internet. click here to read the entire story
Source: guardian.co.uk
The Sun will need to attract more than 250,000 subscribers to its £2-per-week online service to cover the loss of online advertising and recoup the £30m-plus it paid for the digital Premier League football highlights, according to City analysts’ estimates.
Source: marketingmag.ca
The latest readership data from NADbank shows that newspapers’ print editions are still the most popular way to read them, staving off digital media’s quest for dominance, for now.
NADbank’s 2010 newspaper readership report shows that while migration to newspaper websites is still happening, readers continue to use print editions as their primary source for news. According to the report, 73% of Canadians read at least one printed newspaper each week; 22% visited a newspaper website each week.
The 2010 study also shows an increase in overall newspaper readership. The number of adults that read a daily or visited a newspaper website each week rose from 14.7 million in 2009 to 15 million in 2010. Both figures represent 78% reach in their respective years.
Across all markets, 73% of readers read a printed edition of a daily newspaper each week and 71% read only the printed edition.
While most adults roam between print and online editions, 6% visited only the newspaper website.
Painting the bigger picture, the study shows that nearly eight out of 10 adults living in daily newspaper markets read either a printed edition or visited a newspaper website each week.
On the average weekday, 47% of adults read a printed daily newspaper, 43% read a Saturday edition and 21% a Sunday edition.
The study gives newspaper readership results for 82 Canadian newspapers and two Detroit newspapers in 53 markets across Canada. NADbank’s database contains the readership habits of 72% of Canadian adults.
A breakdown of readership in the top 10 markets delves into weekly readership for print-only and total readership. The highest readership overall (for both print and online) is Winnipeg (79% weekly printed, 83% total weekly). Next is Vancouver (76% weekly printed, 80% total weekly), Ottawa-Gatineau (73% weekly printed, 80% total weekly), Quebec City (76% weekly printed, 79% total weekly) and Calgary (74% weekly printed, 78% total weekly).
In addition to the 2010 readership study released yesterday, which contains readership and demographic data, NADbank is readying its 2010 Supplementary Report in May, which will include the 2010 single-year data for the top six markets—Toronto, Montréal, Vancouver, Ottawa, Calgary, and Edmonton—as well as Halifax.
Those death-defying newspapers
By David Olive | Sun Feb 13 2011
Source: moneyville.ca
Newspapers are proving so resilient that the term “dying newspaper industry” will be retired in the next year or two.
Newspapers are still profitable, even in the midst of the most punishing ad drought in memory. Readership is at record levels, despite price hikes imposed by publishers. And web interlopers haven’t laid a glove on the industry’s status as society’s dominant news-gatherer.
In the latest sign of the industry’s strength, Statscan reported this week that the pretax profit margin for Canadian newspapers averaged 9.9 per cent last year. That’s down markedly from the halcyon pre-Internet, pre-ad-slump of 12.3 per cent in 2008. But it’s a long way from the extinction forecast for the industry by the most exuberant heralds of a purely digital world, a brave new world devoid of household names like the New York Times, Le Monde and metro dailies like The Toronto Star.
As recently as last year, the industry was shuddering from 2009’s stomach-churning plunge in advertising revenues, which cratered after the onset of the global financial crisis. Sam Zell, the real estate mogul who had just bought newspaper conglomerate Tribune Co., moaned that the industry was “looking at some of the worst advertising numbers in the history of the world.”
In the darkest hours, the venerable Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Denver’s Rocky Mountain News closed. Tribune and CanWest Global Communications Corp., the largest newspaper owners in the U.S. and Canada, respectively, filed for bankruptcy protection.
Yet newspapers appear poised for a bright future. To be sure, ad-revenue growth remains anaemic. And the industry has likely lost forever its lucrative franchise in classified ads, to Craigslist and other online upstarts.
But the widely anticipated “hollowing out” of newspaper readership hasn’t happened. Quite the opposite. The newspaper habit is stronger than ever, with more than three-quarters of Canadian adults, or 77 per cent, reading the print or online edition of a paper at least once a week.
Over the past five years, readership of Canada’s 95 dailies has actually increased, albeit by a modest 3.7 per cent. More than 14.7 million Canadians read a paper each week. That’s a “reach,” or portion of potential audience, that no non-traditional medium comes close to matching.
As important, Canadians are spending more time with newspapers. According to the latest, 2009-10, readership survey by NADbank, the industry group, in Canada’s top 10 markets readers are spending more than 3.8 hours a week with newspaper print editions. That’s up 2.1 per cent over the past three years.
And that at a time when publishers were raising the price of their product, enabling the industry to post a 12.9 per cent increase in circulation revenue between 2007 and 2009 to cushion a 4.9 per cent drop in ad revenues.
Meanwhile, readers are not spending close to two hours a week with the online editions of newspapers. Traditional papers are winning out in cyberspace. Retaining their status as the most trusted of news sources, with brand names dating back to 1778 in the case of the Montreal Gazette, newspapers have been able to build huge online audiences from scratch. The New York Times now claims a staggering 55 million online readers, against a weekday print circulation of less than 900,000. Online now accounts for 26 per cent of the New York Times’ total ad revenue.
Newspapers have benefited enormously from the rapid fragmentation of cyberspace.
The online world now is populated by social-networking sites, including Facebook with its 555 million members. There are some 200 million “blogs,” or personal web logs of writers on every topic from orchids to T-bill investing. There are tens of thousands of specialized newsletters, some published by the usual financial-services industry suspects, others independent, but none differing in content from their non-pixel predecessors. Not to overlook the so-called “aggregators” that merely repackage the online content of traditional media sources.
In that hyper-crowded arena, the advantage has gone to the most familiar tribunes. That would include the 164-year-old Chicago Tribune, which like almost every daily in North America has continued to earn profits through the industry’s worst hours. Indeed, industry warhorses the New York Times, Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal and even Tribune have reported profit gains in the past year.
Having not endured a crisis of this order since Gutenberg, the industry took on the appearance of a man with his hair on fire and trying to put it out with a hammer. Yet the demise of the Seattle P-I and the “Rocky” were simply a long-delayed capitulation to the one-newspaper monopoly that has characterized U.S. cities since the 1970s. And Tribune and CanWest succumbed to unsustainable, acquisition-related debt.
The “barriers to entry,” in econospeak, for launching an online publication are exceedingly minimal. Anyone with a Facebook, Blogger or Flickr account can become a publisher. Volatility is the norm, as underfunded websites are routinely abandoned.
By contrast, Star owner Torstar Corp., with close to $1.5 billion in 2009 revenues, has the resources to launch a portfolio of websites, host dozens of bloggers, and maintain a costly IT crew to run a complex digital enterprise.
Which explains why top-flight U.S. bloggers Andrew Sullivan, Felix Salmon and Eric Alterman have given up their garrets to bunk in with the venerable Atlantic, Reuters and The Nation, respectively. And why aggregators Huffington Post and The Daily Beast have sought shelter in larger and more familiar enterprises, AOL Inc. and the 77-year-old Newsweek, respectively.
In the past 12 months, shares in North America’s top10 publicly traded newspaper firms have gained an average of 20.8 per cent. And that’s before any meaningful recovery in ad revenues, or significant migration of print advertisers to online. And ahead of the New York Times’ second experiment, later this year, with trying to charge for selected online content. That’s a feat the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times have pulled off, and that Murdoch’s general-interest papers are now attempting.
Not long into the Internet’s brief history, users were complaining that “trying to get a drink from the Web is like sipping from a fire hydrant.” That growing flood of information is a boon to traditional newspapers. They alone have the expertise to quickly collect and verify staggering amounts of data and present it in reader-friendly formats.
We’ll hear soon enough about the phoenix-like rebirth of newspapers. It will be a crock, since there were no ashes to rise from. But editors will enjoy handling those reports far more than the industry obits they’ve edited these past few years.
Source: Editor&Publisher
By: Bill Ostendorf
A continued, gradual drop in print readership could be explained as a natural result of technological changes. But the dramatic drops experienced by newspapers in recent years have been greatly accelerated by our own, self-inflicted wounds.
We’ve mangled our print publications with ill-timed and executed news hole reductions, publishing cycle changes, staff cuts, and price increases combined with aimless redesigns, crazy Web strategies, and a lack of real innovation. As a result, our situation is much worse than it should have been.
John Shmuel, Financial Post · Thursday, Nov. 11, 2010
Source: financialpost.com
Newspapers will certainly survive well into the future, but that survival is going to rely on finding increasingly new and innovative ways to monetize their content — and not just putting up pay walls.
Finding a happy middle was the message that came through most strongly during the Media in Transformation conference held in Toronto Thursday which was hosted by the Audit Bureau of Circulation.
Paul Godfrey, chief executive of Postmedia Network Inc., which owns the National Post, and one of the event’s speakers, said right now all eyes are on newspapers such as The New York Times, which will put up its pay wall in January.
“You know, I think everyone is exploring pay walls. Everybody seems to be waiting to see what happens,” he said in an interview after his speech. “The fact is that that’s going to be one of the big questions.”
Keeping readers, and drawing in new ones after a pay wall goes up meanwhile elicited different opinions from a panel that sat down to debate whether readers should be paying for content at all.
One of the panelists, Andrew Madden, who is Google’s head of strategic partnerships, said newspapers risk bleeding off readership if they erect pay walls that make them invisible to search engines.
“You need to think strategically on how to use search engines and pay walls,” he said.
Mr. Godfrey stressed that innovation was an important facet in monetizing the content of newspapers.
He cited an example where a newspaper might have a restaurant review section, and allow other users to comment or submit their own reviews. In order to monetize the content, the newspaper could charge restaurant owners to post their own submissions about their business, or even post their menus.
“Restaurateurs don’t traditionally advertise in newspapers, it’s just too expensive for them,” he said. “But something like that gives them an opportunity to be able to use our platform.”
Mr. Godfrey also said it was crucial that the newspaper industry direct capital spending toward improving digital con-tent, rather than spending it on traditional technologies.
“We can’t be spending it on printing presses because, A, they’re very costly, and you can get a printing press that’s 20 years old and it’s still in great working condition,” he said. “But now printing presses have colour on every page for example, so you’re behind the times five years after you spend millions and millions of dollars.”
And whereas improving the traditional newspaper medium will likely only serve to impress current readers, Mr. Godfrey said increasing capital spending on digital content and delivery will help build an audience, since digital content can engage audiences in ways newspapers can’t.
Of course, funding digital content won’t matter unless people are willing to pay for it. The good news, however, is that most of the event’s speakers believed that readers are willing to pay for quality content.
“If you have exclusive content, niche content — people are drawn to that,” said Lynne Brennan, senior vice-president of circulation for Dow Jones & Company. “If you provide readers with something they want, they’re going to pay for it.”
The Observer, Sunday 17 October 2010
There is no clear correlation between a rise in internet traffic and a fall in newspaper circulation. Some papers are growing in both formats, others are succeeding in neither, according to new research.
The woe, as usual, is more or less unconfined. September’s daily newspaper circulation figures, as audited by ABC, are down 5.31% in a year: Sunday totals are 6.7% off the pace. And, of course, we all know what’s to blame. It’s the infernal internet, the digital revolution, the iPad, laptop and smartphone taking over from print. Online is the coming death of Gutenberg’s world, inexorable, inevitable, the enemy of all we used to hold dear. Except that it isn’t.
A fascinating new piece of research this week looks in detail at the success of newspaper websites and attempts to find statistical correlations with sliding print copy sales. As one goes up, the other must go down, surely? These are the underpinnings of transition.
But “in the UK at least, there is no such correlation”, reports the number-crunching analyst Jim Chisholm. “This is true at both a micro-level in terms of UK newspaper titles and groups and at a macro-level comparing national internet adoption with circulation performance. Indeed, the opposite case could be argued: that newspapers that do well on the web also do better in print… Understandably worried traditional journalists should know that the internet is not a threat.”
Chisholm’s aim is to prod British publishers into renewed web action – citing the Guardian, Telegraph and Independent particularly for producing the highest ratios of monthly unique visitors to their sites when compared against print circulations. (The Guardian, with a 125 unique-visitor-to-print ratio, is far higher than any other European paper he can find, and also generates over three times the number of UK page impressions relative to its circulation). Moreover, UK national papers as a whole score well on such tests, clear top of the EU league and walloping German performance nine times over.
Could they, and British regionals, do better, though? Indeed they could. “The issue is not one of total audience, but of frequency and loyalty – and online, as in print, newspapers are great at attracting readers from time to time, but they don’t attract them often enough, and they don’t hang around.”
At which point, perhaps, it’s time to look at the flipside of Chisholm’s findings. If the name of one game is frequency and loyalty – via investment, innovation, constant linkages and promotions – might that not also be an answer to drooping print sales as well? If you reject the net as an agent of newsprint doom, then reverse scenarios also apply.
Go back to ABC circulations before newspaper websites really began – say September 1995 – to make the point. One, the Daily Star, is doing better than 15 years ago with no net presence to speak of: 757,080 copies in 1995 against 864,315 last month. The Daily Mail, at 2,144,229 this September against 1,866,197, is well up, with a website growing by more than 60% a year. Some – say the Mirror, down from 2,559, 636 to 1,213,323 – have suffered direly. See: no correlations?
The Guardian, Times and Telegraph are all down by around a third, and the Sun has lost more than a million: but again there’s no mechanical relationship here. Price matters. It always does. But investment and innovation matter as well. They always do. And you can’t help by being struck how little of that goes on in print these days. A pull-out section vanishes, and comes back. Single-theme front pages come and go at the Indy. The Telegraph still looks for somewhere else to put its features. Nothing much changes. Another researcher (at Enders Analysis) calculates that papers have lopped 20% of the pages they put in a decade ago in order to bulwark sharply rising cover prices.
No correlations here, either? Nothing to prove that the more effort and talent you put in, the more you get out? More, more, more … and more research, please.