The fortunes of the newspaper industry took a turn for the worse when The Independent announced it was to become the first national title to go digital.
The paper, which sold 428,000 daily copies in its prime, will no longer be printed from March.
Its owner Evgeny Lebedev said: “We faced a choice: manage the continued decline of print, or convert the digital foundation we’ve built into a sustainable, profitable future.”
With sales falling to as little as 28,000 it was perhaps not surprising Mr Lebedev made the leap into the digital only world.
But viewed in the context of other struggling national titles, industry job losses and the closure of regional and local newspapers up and down the country, are we witnessing the beginning of the end of print? Or, are rumours of its demise exaggerated?
An industry insider we spoke to believes there is a future for print and feels it is unlikely other national papers will be following The Independent’s lead anytime soon.
He said: “The Independent had had a particularly traumatic crash in print sales which led it to think it can only survive by going digital, but most papers think you need both print and digital.
“What most newspapers have found is that if you charge the same price for both digital and print products you reach a stage where the digital subscriptions stop rising and become steady and the print sales only decline slightly. We are not seeing a great rush to digital in the way that we thought we might five years ago. There are still a lot of people who want print and it is a bit like eBooks – sales of eBooks are going down and people are going back to books.
“The hope, certainly for upmarket newspapers, is that printed newspapers become a premium product which there will always be a demand for.
“It is a pretty gloomy time in newspapers at the moment with a tightening of budgets everywhere. I think we all realise the industry cannot sustain the costs it has in the past and cutting costs is very painful, but if you cut yourself out from print entirely, as The Independent has done, you are cutting yourself off from an important segment of your market.”
What does seem clear is that newspapers need to develop a successful way of monetising their digital output. Currently there are three main models which are being used: A paywall (Financial Times, The Times and Sunday Times), advertising (The Daily Mail) and sponsorship and deals (The Guardian and Telegraph). Some publications are using a combination of all three.
The Mail seems to have made the advertising model work partly because of its massive global reach.
The sponsorship model is popular among PRs and content marketers because they love the idea of being able to write an article for themselves or a client and get it into a newspaper in the guise of editorial. But readers generally know an advertorial when they see it and journalistic integrity can be called into question. You may recall Telegraph journalist Peter Oborne quit the paper last year claiming that it wouldn’t publish anything critical of HSBC because of its sponsorship deals.
So what about paywalls? Well, The Economist has seen online subscriptions rocket by 31 per cent in the last year while the FT, The Times and Sunday Times seem to be enjoying some successes. It seems readers are prepared to pay for quality digital content. The Sun, on the other hand, recently abandoned its paywall.
Another model which is emerging is the micro sale, which involves people paying a small amount for a particular article rather than having to invest in a subscription. Bendle is leading this particular approach.
Our insider said: “Everyone is experimenting with their own way of monetising their digital output and The Times and The Sunday Times have had a bit of success with their paywall and have a regular income coming in from subscriptions, which covers a lot of the costs of the operations.
“Then you see other models around where people charge once you go past a certain level of consumption of the content.
“The industry as a whole has not yet decided what the best way is. We are all just watching each other’s experiments to see what works.”
It seems, therefore, that newspapers need to continue to innovate and find the best mix of print and digital. The industry is facing a critical time, but the obituaries about print may have been penned prematurely.
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