Earlier this year, Jan Wifstrand, the editor of Sweden’s Svenska
Dagbladet newspaper, had an idea. The front page, he said, was to be
cleared of any reports by the paper’s own journalists. In its place
would appear a transcript of the previous night’s 30-minute news
bulletin on Swedish TV. Why? Because it just happened to fit neatly on
to one broadsheet page.
The point Wifstrand hoped to make was that the TV programme was over in
half an hour, whereas after page 1 of a newspaper come pages 2, 3 and so
on. It was, he claimed, a clear case of shallow versus in-depth
reporting, and Wifstrand’s aim was to show that, when it came to the
latter, newspapers beat TV hands down.
It was a daring move, and one that other European editors have copied
with varying degrees of success. But is the picture as bleak as that
painted by Wifstrand? Figures produced by the World Association of
Newspapers show that, with a few exceptions (such as Italy and Spain)
newspaper readership across Europe is in gentle but relentless decline.
In the UK, for example, daily newspaper sales for 1996 were down 5.9 per
cent on the 1992 total, and by 3.8 per cent from 1996 to 1995.
Publishers seem to be tiring of getting their fingers burned, too: the
number of daily titles across Europe shrank from 1,170 to 1,128 between
1992 and 1996.
It is a familiar scare story: the dinosaurs of the newspaper era losing
their place at the feeding trough to their more agile younger
competitors like TV and the Internet. But is it true? Hugo Drayton, the
Daily Telegraph’s marketing and new-media director, thinks that in one
crucial area - advertising - TV no longer exerts the pull it once
did.
He notes that Kellogg’s, the UK’s second largest TV advertiser, has
reallocated some of its vast adspend in favour of newspapers and
magazines, an area it had previously ignored altogether. It’s a tiny
amount, says Drayton, but it’s a start.
Another argument that Wifstrand’s front page cannot address is the claim
that newspapers are more expensive to produce than TV. That, says the
media commentator and former editor of the Daily Mirror, Roy Greenslade,
is not true. ’It is simply not the case that TV is more profitable than
newspapers. Newsprint was expensive last year and so newspapers were
expensive to produce, but this year newsprint is cheaper. Besides,
profits are cyclical, business is global and you can transfer
investments and use those profits when needed.’ Put another way, any
media baron with an interest in both newspapers and television is highly
unlikely to ransack one for the sake of the other.
In the early days of cable TV, there were some crude resource-sharing
experiments between newspapers and TV by Kelvin MacKenzie at Live TV and
Sir David English at Channel One, but the ruse of planting a newspaper
correspondent in a studio and suddenly expecting them to turn
camera-friendly was a dismal failure. ’There used to be a lot of synergy
between newspapers and TV,’ says Greenslade. ’But synergy is no reason
to get together. The reason is commercial. There are still great gains
to be made from ad revenue, and the newspaper owners know that.’
Elsewhere, the retreat from print is not as advanced as some might
think.
After some enthusiastic job-cutting and a vigorous redesign overseen by
Andrew Neil, the European aims to relaunch itself in the new year as a
’viewspaper’ with the ambitious aim: to out-Economist the Economist. It
is probably all Rupert Murdoch’s fault. Stung by the gains made by News
Corp, other newspaper groups have virtually reinvented themselves to
broaden their appeal. At the Telegraph, Drayton is adamant that the
paper is well prepared to face the challenge of new media. And whether
as a printed paper or in its online form, Drayton predicts that the
newspaper as a whole will win both ways. ’The paper wins by being
exposed to the latest technology, and the Website gains access to a
really strong commercial brand.’
What this means is that there will be long-term erosion (through
electronic media) of those sections of the paper that are already
obsolete before they have left the news plant, although newspaper
modernisers should tread carefully. If the Telegraph were to drop its
racing results, which are ignored by 95 per cent of readers but are the
stuff of life for a minority, there would be howls of protest. The aim,
then, is to create an online demand for such services that could
gradually replace the printed form.
For the time being, though, says Drayton: ’Papers are so readable and
portable; they’re the core activity for our lifetime.’
The Guardian pioneered the experimentation with newspaper formats when
its Weekend section went tabloid in 1989. Its marketing director,
Stephen Palmer, says: ’At the moment, a media company is defined by its
channel of distribution. In the future that will change.’ He envisages a
paper selling 500,000 daily copies could break that down into, say,
250,000 print readers, 100,000 online and 25,000 downloading some
tailored sections of the text, and the others receiving it by fax or
other means.
He also sees a bright future for newspapers and magazines in masthead
programming on cable.
What of newspaper groups themselves? Greenslade is in no doubt: ’There
are going to be more mergers between weaker and stronger parties. The
trouble is, the British have always believed in plurality and diversity,
and we have long had a fear of conglomerates. That has crumbled and will
continue to do so.’ And, so far, no British newspaper has attempted
anything so gimmicky as to replace its front page with the script of the
previous night’s TV news. Which is probably a healthy sign.
