(Cross posted from ShiftLock, my tech column in the Canadian Newspaper Association’s paper, The Publisher)
Straws in the wind, or a sea change blowing in?
- This past quarter at the New York Times (and my own newspaper and many, many others) circulation surpassed advertising as the dominant revenue source for newspaper operations.
- Advertising revenue for US newspapers showed double digit declines for the 8th consecutive quarter.
- A brand-new Portuguese national daily newspaper is attracting attention – and readers – with a design philosophy that places readers and their daily needs first. Paid circulation jumped by 50 percent within five months of launch.
- But further north, the London Evening Standard – which had a 50p cover price and a circulation in the 250,000 range – announced it was going free and would become a giveaway. They expect circulation to settle in the 600,000 range.
- And lastly, the Dallas Morning News has placed their sports and entertainment editors under general managers who report to the vp of sales and advertising. Down comes the wall.
What’s going on?
I don’t have to tell you that our industry is in the midst of a very, very, messy transition.
Take forty years of declining market share and a decades-old slide in circulation on the one hand, toss in the flight of classified and employment advertising to the web on the other, and then add a nearly world-wide recession into the mix and you have the makings of very rough ride.
It’s causing publishers everywhere to ask some hard questions about who are they really serving, advertisers or readers? Can you truly serve both?
It would seem, from the examples above, that different publishers are arriving at different answers to that question.
I heard a CBC podcast recently, a recording of the 2009 Dalton Camp lecture given by Kenneth Whyte, founding editor of the National Post and author of The Uncrowned King, a look at William Randolph Hearst’s remarkable foray into the New York newspaper business at the end of the 19th century.
In his talk, Whyte pointed out that back in Hearst’s time, when he took on Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, newspapers were funded by readers – they lived and died on their circulation revenue, on the pennies and nickels of a vast and fickle readership.
Newspapers did not cloak themselves in objectivity, but rather wore their partisanship proudly.
They fought for their readers daily, chasing scoops and pushing out extra editions in a frantic effort to catch the readers eye. If they succeeded it was because they gave voice to their reader’s fears and foibles, because they championed them and cared for them.
Because they served them.
The rise of mass market advertising, however, supplanted this model with newspapers that strove, not to grab readers by the throat, or to be their voice, but rather to speak blandly to the greatest number of readers, so they could deliver the largest possible market for their advertisers.
Whyte appeared to be saying that the ‘modern’ journalist’s embracing of objectivity is nothing more than making a virtue of a vice.
The dismantling of the advertising driven model – or at least the version we’ve been familiar with for the past several decades – is leading us closer to that earlier model, when newspapers had to serve readers first in order to earn their pennies.
The web – with it’s chaotic jumble of voices, proudly partisan and deeply fractured – sounds in many ways like the New York amid the newspaper wars of the 1890′s. So I don’t know if it’s ironic or sad that virtually every web start-up of the past decade has turned not to their ‘readers’ for their revenue, but to advertisers.
Worth Reading
2009 Dalton Camp Lecture – You can still listen to the CBC podcast at:
Is ‘i’ the future of journalism? The blog of the World’s Editors Forum takes a look at I, the new Portuguese daily newspaper