It used to be simple. The newspaper was there to convey the news.
Information was king and a good story on the front page was worth
thousands in sales terms. However, in today’s multimedia world the
newspaper is no longer the first port of call for information junkies,
and news is no longer the chief selling point for readers and
advertisers alike. Across Europe papers are re-inventing themselves as
one-stop specialists in areas previously dismissed as niche, or in
special interest markets such as IT, sport and youth-oriented
features.
The experience of the Neue Westfalische Group of Germany is one that has
been repeated across Europe. Its four newspapers have a total
circulation of 270,000 and its flagship publication, the Neue
Westfalische, sells about 166,500. For years the title prospered on an
old-fashioned diet of news and a smattering of general interest
features, together with comprehensive general sports coverage. But that
recipe is no longer enough.
The title has been suffering from many of the same problems that are
afflicting the newspaper business in Germany, in particular, and in
large swathes of Europe in general. The main problem is decreasing
audience numbers. Five years ago Germany’s press market encompassed more
than 31 million paid-for copies. Sales have now dropped comfortably
below 30 million and they continue to fall, if slightly more slowly.
’What was happening to us was a combination of things,’ Wolfgang Geese,
the ad director at Neue Westfalische, explains. ’Our ad sales were
stagnating, we were suffering from price competition and consumers were
substituting papers based on the latest promotion or price point. It was
threatening our whole strategic position.’
His solution was to commission the most in-depth research his paper had
ever undertaken, designed both to quantify the links that readers have
with their paper and also to show advertisers the links they had with
the paper’s readership.
The idea was to identify the areas of overlap so that the editorial
features could be expanded and more closely reflect that connection,
while the same results and their editorial application could then form
the substance of some 1,200 customer presentations. Since the research
results were returned, features in the paper have now been
comprehensively remodelled, with the traditional women’s, IT and sports
sections given a much more local feel and vastly increased pagination,
while international features and political news have been trimmed.
Elsewhere the first recourse to this same problem has traditionally been
the magazine supplement. In Germany, the weekly paper, Die Zeit,
launched its own magazine back in 1970. The merits of this approach are
that they increase the circulation of the parent newspaper and are
attractive to advertisers because they offer an appropriate full-colour
ad opportunity.
The two largest and most prestigious of the German magazine supplements,
Die Zeit Magazin and Suddeutsche Zeitung Magazin, have nonetheless
struggled in recent years.
In 1997, for instance, DZ Magazin saw ad revenues fall by 2.3 per cent
on the previous year, while SZ Magazin’s revenues fell by 7 per cent in
the same period. In part this reflects the increasing choices now
available for advertisers, but it also follows on from this same loss of
readers.
In this respect too, there has been no hiding place since supplements
began to be audited separately in 1996.
The answer for some publishers has been in returning to first
principles. They’ve made the supplements far more tightly targeted, if
less lavishly produced, and in many cases taken them back within the
magazine to encourage trial among the readership, while keeping
additional production costs to a minimum.
That’s the case in Italy, where the country’s two leading titles,
Corriere della sera and La Repubblica, have gone even further toward
segmenting readership. They are competing to build their portfolio of
daily tabloid sections.
La Repubblica, for instance, now offers the youth title, Musikal, a
financial section, Affari e Finanza, a health and medical supplement,
Salute, an IT section, Computer Valley, and a travel and tourism
section, I Viaggi.
In Spain, the key to attracting this elusive younger audience is thought
to be more a question of presentation than of any real structural
change.
’Newspapers overall now need to be sensitive to stylistic changes
imposed by today’s omnipresent audio-visual culture,’ El Pais’s
associate editor, Angel Harguindey, says. His most striking solution is
the Friday supplement, Las Tentaciones. Written and designed from a
youth point of view, it is published in four different regional
editions.
Elsewhere in Europe, though, there is a feeling that it is no longer
enough simply to produce similar supplements to everybody else. Readers
don’t necessarily want to wade through ever thicker papers, only to feel
guilty if they don’t make it all the way through.
European editors who attended a summit on the subject last month,
organised by the World Association of Newspapers, were offered a
prescription for change based on the experience of the successful
Swedish paper, Sydsvenska Dagbladet. The editor-in-chief, Jan Wifstrand,
urged other papers to resist what he called the ’editor’s disease’ now
sweeping Europe; namely the urge to always want to do more, not
less.
’We have to do less of certain things, or readers won’t be able to stand
us for another 30 to 40 years,’ he warns. ’We should be providing less
passive repetition of facts and figures, less Monica Lewinsky, less
national affairs, and more of what’s going on ’closer in’ when we write
editorials in the paper.’
Whether his comments will be taken on board by Europe’s top publishers
and editors is another matter entirely but they do tally with the Neue
Westfalische research. Wifstrand also has one further powerfully
persuasive factor in his favour: since he instituted these changes,
sales of his paper are now outperforming Sweden’s sluggish newspaper
market.
And that’s the one language that all of Europe’s newspapers can really
understand.
