MQT Panel Questions Future In Print
How long can newspapers go on as printed entities? That was the implied point drawn from a question posed at last night’s MediaTel Media Question Time.
Richard Eyre, a non-executive director of The Guardian Media Group and chairman of the Internet Advertising Bureau, told the audience that, although the Guardian still has some future in traditional paper-based form, like all ‘old media,’ its days in the present format are numbered.
“The view of The Guardian is that the newspaper has a continuing life as a physical paper object, but it can’t bank its future on that,” Eyre explained.
“There’s one crucial piece of technology that we’re missing,” continued Adam Singer, chief executive of the MCPS-PRS Alliance. “That’s the replacement for paper – flexible screens which do not make readers bleary eyed. Over the next ten years these will begin to arrive, and will be able to plug into the net and pull everything down. The second they arrive and the second the cost goes down my advice is to sell your print stocks.”
“The extraordinary thing about The Guardian,” Eyre said, “is that it’s owned and protected by a trust in order that it should continue to produce great journalism in the way that it always has done. The management of the paper identified that the right way to do that is to express the purpose beyond bits of physical newspaper.”
The media boss went on to explain that physical newspapers were still a valid proposition for the foreseeable future, as “there are still over 400,000 buying those bits of newspaper every day and that’s a substantial thing.”
Eyre admitted however that, in the long term, there is “a very interesting discussion to be had about the future of paper products,” adding that, “for the next ten years there’s no problem with The Guardian or the Times doing whatever they can to ensure that their paper product is represented in the best possible way.”
The Media Question Time panel, chaired by the BBC’s media correspondent Torin Douglas and comprised additionally of David Hanger, former publisher of the Economist; Fru Hazlitt, chief executive of Virgin Radio; Adam Singer, chief executive of the MCPS-PRS Alliance and Phil Georgiadis, CEO of Walker Media went on to discuss the prospect of an electronic replacement for traditional newspapers.
Fru Hazlitt was similarly pessimistic about the future prospects of newsprint. “Sure, there are still things that can be done in traditional media,” she said. “But if they don’t move forward into the digital age, if they persistently sit there and say ‘this is always how its been and this is how it’s going to stay’ then they are dead. It’s as simple as that. And we might have a few more years of Metro being launched, but at the end of they day you are just not going to beat [forward thinking] companies like Google. Get real.”
Asked for advice on a future media career, Adam Singer commented: “What I would say to anybody starting off their career now is always head for the current frontier, and whatever you do, do not work for any company with its roots in pre-digital technology.”
Elsewhere Phil Georgiadis was more upbeat, seeing a future in print for some time to come, albeit with adjusted communication strategies. “I’m sorry to be boring with numbers,” he said, “but the simple facts are that in five years the readership of the Sun, The Mirror and the News of the World has declined by about 20%, but the quality sector hasn’t gone down as much. The reason is that people are still reading them, but reading them less often, so the problem we have in advertising is a daily reach problem, not a reach problem as such.
“Newspapers are being read by 5% less people in total, but 20% less on a given day, but do you know what they’re reading instead? They’re reading Nuts and Zoo and Closer, so they’re substituting one form of behaviour for another, so we just have to redefine how we speak to people. The quality sector is holding its own. It’s costing a lot of money, but it is holding its own. We have lighter readers, not fewer readers. Although I would agree that if you are starting a career it’s probably not the best place to start.”
David Hanger was similarly upbeat, and of the opinion that the print industry will continue to operate as a viable business for some time yet. However, the former publisher of the Economist stated that “the daily newspaper is a tough place to be because of all the technology bringing things to us more quickly, making it easier to get at that thing called news, whether that’s via your palm pilot or your phone or PC.”
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