There were many worried faces at the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) conference held last week in Washington because of the uncertain future facing the print industry.
The question on everyone’s lips over the three days was “What next?” This comes on the back of increasing flux in the newspaper business. For instance, global circulation revenues are larger than advertising income for the first time this century.
Figures released at the conference showed that newspapers generated an estimated $179 billion in circulation and advertising revenue in 2014. Of this amount, $92 billion came from print and digital circulation, and $87 billion from advertising.
This reflects a major new trend, especially because the idea of newspapers charging readers for access to content was met with widespread skepticism at first. Yet this has proven successful in the United Kingdom with The Times and the Financial Times, and in the United States with the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.
With everyone searching for the ideal business model, the organizers of the conference brought in experienced speakers including Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher and board president of the New York Times. He is widely credited for having taken difficult decisions that has transformed the way newspapers do business, and found new sources of income.
He revealed that his newspaper looked at three key areas — audience growth, newsroom statistics and newsgathering strategies. His focus on growing the newspaper’s readership has seen traffic rise by 28 percent on its website and 50 percent via its phone app, with a resultant increase in profits.
Other impressive success stories include USA Today, whose president and publisher Larry Kramer said that the paper had invested more on quality content, instead of going the other route. This has seen a rise in profits, with the same happening at the other 81 newspapers in the United States.
Several of the speakers pointed out that audiences have now returned to newspapers after finding the content on the Internet chaotic and largely unreliable. They want journalists to provide them with credible reports and analyses, filtering out all the other noise. This change has seen newspapers now able to choose their content, giving them more power in society.
Meanwhile, while changes are taking place in these countries, Arab media houses are moving slowly forward, seemingly unaware of the huge challenges ahead. Among the 1,000 participants at this major conference, I only found three Arabs.
It is important for media organizations to learn from the experiences, failures, difficulties and innovations of others. Change is inevitable and organizations need to use this knowledge to develop realistic strategies, especially marrying new technologies with newsgathering processes. It would not be a bad idea for programmers to work with journalists in newsrooms to generate ideas.
It is clear that media organizations can achieve success and profitability by focusing on six areas: The enormous growth in the use of mobile; video which is expected to represent 50 percent of all content; local advertising; programmatic marketing that automates advertising spend; the use of their data to refine newsgathering and launch studies; and electronic commerce, events and conferences that many institutions depend on for their basic income.
To survive in this fast-changing industry requires a new mindset. Perhaps developing countries are fortunate because they can see what the future challenges and solutions are by looking at what is happening in other countries. It will make planning all that much easier.
