Can publishers master a coherent print-online strategy?

As tablet sales sky rocket, what are the implications for publishers that started life in print media? Raymond Snoddy looks at the path to a truly workable print-online strategy – and notes that the New Year has offered news both good and bad.

Sometimes an almost random collection of modest facts can add up to more than the sum of the parts – and start to form a pattern, like shaking the small pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope.

The continued rise of tablet devices as the price tumbles is a trend too obvious to ignore. They are now out-selling PCs for the first time and during the Christmas period there were more BBC iPlayer requests from tablets than computers.

People may have just been trying out their new toys in their millions before discarding them in January but at prices of around £100, and falling, the tablet is on the way to becoming a universal device.

But those facts have very considerable implications for publishers. Consumers may primarily treasure tablets for video entertainment but every tablet owner is a potential customer for newspaper publishers consuming both video news and text.

They also provide publishers with a chance to start again and charge for expensively assembled information. People will pay for apps, presenting a way of slowly weaning them off the unfortunately created expectation that high quality information should always be available for free.

The rise of the always-there tablet device should also help David Montgomery in his Local World mission. The regional publisher, which brings together Northcliffe Media and Iliffe News and Media, said this week the company has almost doubled the number of unique monthly online readers in a year.

The total has gone from 7.3 million in December 2012 to more than 14 million now. The Local World chairman also announced plans to re-launch a number of print publications, pointing to a potentially strong print-digital local offering.

The jury, of course, is still out on whether it will make sense in the long-term to hoover up endless amounts of local information and put it online. Some still see it as the opposite of journalism.

We must also await further evidence that Montgomery can fulfil his promise that such a combined print and online approach really can “drive strong revenue, as well as audience growth.”

At the very least the evidence of online growth is providing some evidence that there might be something in the brave Montgomery experiment.

Advertising Age has made a rather less courageous move which seems at first glance to be a significant step backwards – slipping from weekly publication to 25 albeit larger issues a year.

The economics have presumably spoken loudly here, but the American advertising bible has at least avoided the temptation of going entirely digital. Must-have specialist publications with an international following can make a case for dropping print and going entirely online. Even then the danger is always a loss of impact that flows from an inability to stand out from the endless stream of digital information.

Advertising Age promises at least 50 per cent more pages in its new version with “strong enterprise stories that focus on trends, consumer behaviour, company strategy and our industry’s movers and shakers.”

Obviously Ad Age Digital will increasingly handle the breaking stories across the fortnight.

The strength of the move is that it is a coherent print-online strategy that saves production and postal costs while still benefiting from the advantages of both forms of distribution.

The disadvantage is equally obvious. Once you move to less frequent publication periods there is always the temptation to continue on the downward slide. How about monthly with more comprehensive data and longer reads, and really there is a lot to be said for quarterly.

As publications grapple for the most appropriate digital-print mix it is not clear just how smart it is for newspapers to say Happy New Year to their readers with an above-inflation price rise.

Maybe the hope is that consumers will be so stunned after the holiday period that they won’t notice or that the price rises won’t look so bad compared with train or energy increases.

Media analysts tend to peer into the future and predict that ultimately printed newspapers will become premium products, status symbols.

Maybe they didn’t expect it to happen quite so quickly.

On Monday The Times increased its cover price from £1 to £1.20 while trumpeting the fact that the subscription price is 60p.

If not the actual cause of the 20p rise, one beneficial side effect should be to push more readers into taking out regular subscriptions. The mathematics must work, presumably, because at least some casual purchasers are converted into regular subscribers. The Times will now have the same Monday to Friday price as the Daily Telegraph.

The price rises at the Guardian are slightly more surprising because they come so soon after the last lift in January last year.

The Saturday Guardian is going up from £2.30 to £2.50 with the weekday editions climbing from £1.40 to £1.60.

The rise accompanied on Saturdays with a new lifestyle supplement is obviously part of chief executive Andrew Miller’s medium-term plan to take the Guardian Media Group at least in the direction of break even.

He is testing the loyalty of Guardian print readers to destruction and risks sending another ripple in the direction of the lower-yielding online version.

Underlying the Guardian price rise must be some sense of the print-digital balance the company is trying to create.

As tablets grew and prices rose, a very modest press release arrives from the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) Appointment Panel.

The news is that an Appointments Panel has been set up. This is actually good news for the newspaper industry. It suggests that at long last something is stirring and progress is being made in the long trek to create a viable alternative to the Royal Charter created by politicians.

Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, a former Justice of the Supreme Court, Paul Horrocks, former editor-in-chief of the Manchester Evening News, Dame Denise Platt, former chair of the Commission for Social Care Inspection and John Witheroe, editor of The Times, under the chairmanship of Sir Hayden Phillips, makes up the panel.

The first task is to find someone to chair IPSO, and then with their help, select the other members of the board.

So ipso facto the small announcement forms part of the positive pattern and IPSO should be ready to act from May 1.