The real problem facing the newspaper industry…

As Leveson kicks off again, Raymond Snoddy wonders whether a larger remit for Rufus Olins of Newsworks would help sustain newspapers’ economic future…

Imagine a post-Leveson world – a time when Lord Justice Leveson has returned to his legal duties.

A post Press Complaints Commission regulatory body has been set up; and the miscreants of the newspaper industry and the police have either been found to be innocent or have gone off to serve their sentences.

Then perhaps everyone can get down to the real problem facing the newspaper industry – finding a way of sustaining its economic future in an increasingly digital world. Matters of considerable importance to society are at stake.

Something tangible

An enormous range of experimentation is going on and it should not be beyond the wit of man to find a solution, or more probably a range of solutions, to the central problem of increasing revenues from digital services while continuing to finance print as long as a significant number of readers want to hold something tangible.

The numbers are not quite as bleak as Lord Justice Leveson was led to believe. It is true that readers spend 40 minutes a day reading a paper compared to 15 minutes a month grazing online. If that was the whole story then it is very easy to understand the near impossibility of turning digital advertising pennies into pounds.

Tablets – a step in the right direction

The dramatically low 15-minute figure is true of the web but does not include all platforms such as tablets. Include iPad devices and according to the latest TouchPoints research the numbers soar to a much more creditable two and a half hours a week.

You can sell two and a half hours a week and because users at the moment tend to be upmarket you can look at a decent, and rising, stream of revenue from both subscriptions and advertising.

Luckily few, if any, publishers have been silly enough to give away the content of entire newspapers on iPads and similar devices for nothing.

It’s an exaggeration to say that tablets will single-handedly save the newspaper industry but they are an important step in the right direction and it is not too difficult to envisage a world where tablets become a basic tool of communication.

Newsbrands

If you add together newspaper readership to the digital audience then the influence of newspapers or “newsbrands” as Rufus Olins, chief executive of Newsworks, the renamed Newspaper Marketing Agency would have it, then overall influence of the medium is growing. Many even in the communications business would be forgiven for not realising that.

Newspapers are routinely ridiculed, sometimes in their own columns, as a medium on its last legs heading inevitably for oblivion. It’s clearly only a matter of time before declining sales finally catch up with newspapers after more than two centuries.

To say there is a perception problem doesn’t even begin to describe it. For many of the young media planners in the agencies – average age of 27 – newspapers are almost an alien concept. It’s not a habit they have ever developed. It’s not something they do. You can find all the news you need via Google and Twitter and it’s all free.

If any other industry was so complacent, apparently sleeping-walking to its eventual doom, it would be pilloried in the business pages of the more serious newspapers.

So what is to be done?

When there is a huge marketing job to be confronted in transforming the image and perception of newspapers it wasn’t enormously smart to apparently halve the budget of the NMA (now Newsworks).

You can change names, play smarter, be more focused, start again with new ideas from a reduced base but sometimes it can come down to a matter of firepower in a noisy world of competing media.

What is most needed – and has been needed for years – is a campaign to market the very concept of newspapers, how important they are for democracy and civil society, highlighting their obvious virtues rather than their all too obvious vices.

Although only a tiny minority of journalists have been guilty of outrageous law-breaking, the danger is that what will linger in the public imagination from the works of Leveson are images such as the scandalous efforts to hack a dead teenager’s mobile. They will continue to colour public perceptions of newspapers as long as nothing more positive is put in its place.

Not just a trade advocate…

In the absence of a concerted campaign to put the case for newspapers by and for the industry – and the absence has lasted for so long there is not much chance it will end anytime soon – at the very least there should be a public advocate for the newspaper industry.

Angela Knight, departing chief executive of the British Bankers’ Association, may have faced an uphill task but day-in day-out she was on the Today programme or Newsnight at least making sure that the case for her industry was put and that the argument was not lost by default. There has been someone plausible to speak on behalf of besieged British bankers.

Has anyone ever represented the newspaper industry in such a sustained or committed way in public?

Rufus Olins

The solution may already exist even for the disputatious and highly competitive newspaper industry. The main task facing Olins of Newsworks is to bring in more advertising for the newspaper industry. The most effective way of doing so is to change perceptions of the industry both with the public and the advertising industry.

He is already talking about swooping when he hears inaccuracies about the state of newspapers – trying to crack down on the dying industry myths.

It would be a very small step to release him informally to perform the role in public of advocate for the national newspaper industry. He is after all a former journalist who loves newspapers.

In the absence of anyone else Rufus Olins could be the man to do it – the plausible newspaper equivalent of an Angela Knight.