The two weeks since the Rupert Murdoch speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors have seen a scramble on the pages of mainstream media to connect with his comments. Few in mainstream media have commented that News Corporation has joining the conversation about the impact of blogging, citizen journalism and newspaper readership late in the day.
The Murdoch speech and the coverage since in many newspapers, Business Week, economist.com and less mainstream forums like the Wilson Quarterly has collectively become a tipping point.
Many in mainstream media now get it that the world has fundamentally changed. It is as if we needed a figurehead to bless the change before we accepted it. Okay, so the conversation about the future has been blessed.
Consumers want greater participation in reporting news. Younger consumers have redefined what are acceptable sources of news are and how they access them. Journalists are breaking out of homogenized news organizations and seeking out independent and cost effective means of reporting what they want to report. Stories are breaking free of aggregated media forms and finding places more suited to their telling. Advertisers are embracing a world where the fees they pay are controlled more by real success than an impression of success. Consumers are embracing choice and individuality over the one size fits all model of the 1980s and 1990s.
Mainstream media can respond to these changes by ensuring that their brand is attached to new mediums of access to content and thereby find a place to retain and even grow advertising revenue. Such pursuit is appropriate for their businesses. They will get closer to consumers and rely less on the supply chain. Look at how radio broadcasters have embraced podcasting in its short lifetime. They get the impact of this new medium and many have invested quickly to get into the space and sell advertising into their podcasts and thereby protect their revenue streams. Newspapers and magazines will need to do the same.
On a side note, the changes in the news and information marketplace will not impact in a linear way. Podcasting, for example, will impact newspapers and magazines even though much of the discussion to this point has been about radio. Disaggregating stories and providing them in other mediums will set the stories free and consumers will find the content they want using the mediums they want. We are in an era where the story is the thing as opposed to the delivery mechanism. Previously you might have had a TV show and a magazine of the same name and quite similar content. Now, with all this wonderful technology you might see less of this.
The current news and information supply chain is where the biggest impact will be felt. Through the changes and after. Through the changes because of the almost chaotic situation where costs will be driven down in a retreating marketplace by people who have not fully considered how to respond to this thing they do not understand. This is where small business will be hit the hardest. After the changes because what will or will not be the role of the supply chain.
The newspaper supply chain – distribution, home delivery and retail – has been a servant of the publishers in Australia since the mid 1880s. For the supply chain – Australia’s 4.600 newsagents – to have a bright future, they need to move from this servant relationship and into a business model which affords more control. The options are considerable yet few are considering them. Now is the time for a conversation about the future, a conversation which pursues understanding in advance of a plan to maintain and grow these small businesses upon which more than 50,000 employees depend for a weekly paycheck. While publisher relationships will be important to newsagents for some years to come, we need to be developing other relationships which suit our business needs and where we have more control in the price of what we sell and the remuneration we can achieve for our services.
The current model where we do not control selling price or service fees puts us at a significant disadvantage as the cost blow out for the distribution of newspapers has shown over the last three years.
With advertising growth at almost exponential rates from their online business while readership of their newspaper falls, how long will it take a publishing company to dramatically alter their physical product distribution model. This is what newsagents need to be thinking about? There is a domino game playing here. Newsagents will feel that a smaller piece of a shrinking pie is better than no pie at all whereas an alternative view might be that the sooner the end game is played the sooner we can see a road forward for our businesses.
While we will hear the thud of a newspaper on the lawn for a while yet, it will happen less and less as predicted by almost every researcher in this field. How quickly is anyone’s guess.
Those in the newspaper and magazine supply chain need to be part of the conversation publishers are engaged in today about their future. We also need to be having our own conversations about our future. And while all that is happening, we need to continue build our businesses for the consumers who are yet to know that anything is changing around them.