Print papers prove their resilience

Sometimes in life even your critics catch up with what you were thinking, even if they don’t realise it. Last week this newspaper published a piece it bought from Politico suggesting readers around the world were not letting print newspapers die.

A good thing too for modern democracy. After all, journalism has never been more important: proper news reporting and investigation that is, rather than spouting off uneducated prejudices and opinions on blog sites.

The argument in the Politico piece by Jack Shafer was based on research on the British newspaper market by Dr Neil Thurman of the University of London and in the US by Iris Chyi of the University of Texas. Thurman’s research, based on published industry figures, found “UK national newspaper brands engage with their online visitors for an average of less than 30 seconds a day, but their print readers for an average of 40 minutes”.

The Politico piece pointed to a Deloitte study that showed 88 per cent of newspaper company revenues across Britain still come from print. Chyi last year criticised the US newspaper industry for splurging cash on online editions when the real profits remained in their “fading print editions”.

I risk sounding like a Luddite, but in fact I read the digital print editions of the papers Monday to Friday and only buy print papers on weekends. And as a former editor-in-chief of this paper, I volunteered in 2011 for The Australian to be the company’s first local masthead to launch a paywall. That paywall is arguably the most successful in the country and the number of paid digital subscribers is now not far behind paid Monday-to-Friday print circulation.

The Thurman and Chyi studies both concede certain newspapers are building useful digital businesses: The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal in the US and the up-market papers in Britain. But for local US papers, digital penetration remains a fraction of print readership and profits remain in the physical product.

In Britain, with its large national newspaper market in a geographically compact country, the popular papers are not making digital work financially and are not succeeding with paywalls, Thurman’s research shows. They are attracting large numbers of eyeballs for small amounts of time, but as I argued in my book Making Headlines,this is not a level of engagement likely to mean much to advertisers. The success of the Daily Mail is probably analogous to the success of Melbourne’s Herald Sun, a distinctly mid-market tabloid that enjoys the uniquely Melbourne “glue” of AFL news domination. But Chyi and her collaborator, Ori Tenenboim, find that of the 51 local city markets they studied, in only 11 were the city’s newspaper online offerings the No 1 news site in town.

So publishers who in the early noughties did not want to be seen as digital dinosaurs started giving away their most valuable print products — think of columns by Paul Kelly at The Australian or Andrew Bolt at the Herald Sun — for free. In 2009, Rupert Murdoch put an end to it and declared journalism an expensive business that readers needed to pay for.

Now the mistake of the noughties is being repeated and publishers are allowing their expensive and unique journalism to be accessed on Facebook, the ebola of journalism.

The Daily Mail is succeeding around the world as a virtual global aggregator. Always a paper with a clear value proposition (it used to carry a line above its masthead: “a paper for women”), it now cannibalises news from all markets it operates in.

The research by Thurman and Chyi confirms a couple of things beyond doubt. To succeed in digital, publishers need a “unique selling proposition”. They need to be a valuable source of what a particular market is prepared to pay for. Here at The Australian it is national affairs, national politics and national business. Here lies the problem faced by the city-based newspapers published by Fairfax and News Corp, and it is why, the Herald Sun aside, they have had less success building paywalls. It is why they need to go back to basics and become the most compelling source of news in their cities.

The lack of a compelling USP is why The Guardian, and soon The New York Times, will struggle in Australia. Like Fairfax and the ABC, they are all fishing for reasonably disengaged younger readers in the same progressive pool. How many news sites can thrive in Australia if their main rationale is despising Donald Trump?

The most important finding of the overseas research is that time spent with a newspaper, reader engagement, is much more significant than time spent with digital products. This is important to advertisers who are now seeing through some of the sharper practices in digital metrics.

Just as e-books have a place, especially in academic and specialist publishing, they have not killed the printed book.

Vastly increasing numbers of news consumers are getting their news online, especially on mobile, but newspaper publishers, apart from those with clearly defined and desirable mission statements, are not succeeding at engaging with those readers for any meaningful period.

Readership of printed newspapers is declining, but in many cases so is readership of their digital offerings. Yet readers around the world — especially older readers — remain very loyal to printed papers. And engagement levels with those loyal readers are ensuring that around the world about 90 per cent of newspaper revenue remains in print.

Some specialist and national newspapers will have valuable digital businesses but many other city-based papers, while being expected to offer readers digital products, will need to refocus marketing, advertising and distribution efforts on their physical news products.