Column: Tuesday September 16th. How bad is it really?

How bad are things really? I mean for us in the press.

In Britain the answer has to be at least “pretty bad” and many friends would put it in saltier terms than that. The rumour is that in some categories of advertising the numbers are nearly 50% off last year. That’s a serious rate of collapse. It goes without saying that all of the main newspaper groups, local and national, are facing the autumn with as much relish as a wisdom tooth extraction.

And yet, there’s another way of looking at things which suggests that we’re on the brink of the most exciting five-year period since the war: a period that we’ll look back on as a renaissance during which innovation and invention blossomed.

I don’t buy into the common notion that mainstream companies will crumble like the investment banks, while nimble niche companies (most of them www something) and Google soak up readers and ad dollars. I don’t underestimate the British newspaper.

It’s already possible, I think, to take a guess at the sort of changes coming, based on chatter from the strategic thinkers and other subterranean rumblings. Here’s my list of things to look out for.

• The campaign for real journalism

There’s going to be a flight to quality. I think this is the inevitable reaction to a period of mass production and focus on price. Just like the food industry, which has evolved from 15 years of price-led marketing to a quality-led period, so people will turn to journalism that explains and excites. The predominant journalistic streams are a) commoditised news b) confessional feature writing c) consumer guides and d) celebrity watching. There’s growing weariness with all this. The revived streams will be a) expert analysis b) long-form reporting c) cutting-edge gossip and d) intelligent aggregation. You can see evidence in the success of The Week and The Economist and Private Eye although no-one is yet producing great British reportage. Of the British newspapers my opinion is that The Times is ahead of the game.

• The new patrons

Quality is expensive and by no means do I think people will be prepared to pay for all of it. Monocle, an archetypal quality magazine, costs £5 which is steep. On the other hand, companies have an ever more sophisticated idea of customer relationship which includes corporate social and cultural responsibility. I believe we will see the public demand for quality reading and the successful business model of the customer magazine sector combining to produce titles that are independent, free-standing and largely supported by a new set of journalistic patrons - companies that simply want to do something good with their money. Look out for Mercedes-Benz monthly or Starbucks daily. My pet longing is for a new weekly magazine of photo-journalism. Perhaps Sony or Nike could sponsor that.

• The return of the editor

Not the sub-editor, mind you. We may as well face the fact that new publishing technology is pretty easy to learn and many (younger) journalists can already write, sub, draw a graphic, edit a photo, write headlines and design a page. (I know one who can do all those things and write CSS code too). No. What I mean is the return of the directing and selecting brain. Algorithms are wonderful and computers make them gloriously cheap but I’m pretty sure that Daylife and its cousins were the new thing of 2008. For 2009 we’ll have The Daily Beast, Tina Brown’s latest enterprise, to be curated by editors and given a distinctive point of view.

• The rise of e-paper

Forget the death of print: this is the new print. Everybody’s making them. E-readers that are light, portable, flexible and as easy on the eye as print and come in a variety of shapes and sizes have been launched almost monthly since half-way through this year. Yes, they are still prohibitively expensive but they won’t be for long. It can only be a matter of months - say 24? - before a newspaper offers its readers a simple e-reader that will exclusively deliver their title once a day or even once an hour. If you are spending £50m a year on print and distribution you could give away 250,000 e-readers today and cover your costs in one year. You could produce a well-designed paper that was constantly updated and with unlimited pagination. I believe you could sell advertising on page impressions. And yes, you could customise that advertising too.

• The first editorially-based website to get media funding

Rather amazingly, Ashley Norris, co-founder of the British blog network Shiny Media, has pointed out that not one journalistic website has attracted any sizeable investment over the past few years. He ascribes this to the relative paucity of British online eyeballs compared to the US, a conservative British ad industry, a strong British loyalty to newspapers and magazines and overwhelming online competition from the BBC. This is the year that the mould will be broken and the maturing of the online advertising model will begin to make commercial sense of journalism on the web. At first it will have to be low cost. But I believe once the mould is broken, then there’s no stemming the tide of change.

• The continued rise of the frees

Much has been written over the summer about the deaths of free papers around the world and it is a fact of course that many of them have not been healthy and have been snuffed out by the crunch. Two points, however, have not been sufficiently highlighted. The first is that free newspapers are a young sector that has experienced explosive exponential growth so you are bound to have a bubble effect, just as dotcom did. The second is that nobody comments on the quality of the papers that close and yet, of course, that must be crucial to their survival chances. It is high time free newspapers did get properly reviewed for quality rather than discussed as if they were more or less identical. One of the best free newspapers in Europe is our own beloved Metro, produced by Associated. Profitable, Metro has added more than £200m to the value of Associated in the past decade. Free papers will continue to encroach on paid-for titles and the free sector will increasingly split into clear market segments, just as the paid-for sector did.

What have I not mentioned? User-generated content. Networked journalism. Interactivity. Social websites. Why? Because I do not believe they are the big story. Of course, I very well know that I may be stupendously wrong.

Add comment September 16th, 2008