Media disruption

A company associated with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is to acquire The Washington Post. This move just announced has shocked many. It’s certainly a game changer.  Bezos is a smart guy. His vision has driven extraordinary change in book publishing. His WaPo move is certain to trigger change elsewhere around newspapers.

Read what Jeff Bezos wrote about the acquisition. This passage is especially interesting to me:

The Internet is transforming almost every element of the news business: shortening news cycles, eroding long-reliable revenue sources, and enabling new kinds of competition, some of which bear little or no news-gathering costs. There is no map, and charting a path ahead will not be easy. We will need to invent, which means we will need to experiment. Our touchstone will be readers, understanding what they care about – government, local leaders, restaurant openings, scout troops, businesses, charities, governors, sports – and working backwards from there. I’m excited and optimistic about the opportunity for invention.

Twitter is ablaze with tweets about this move and questioning how Bezos will behave as a newspaper proprietor.  I doubt Bezos will see himself as this. I suspect he will see himself has having just purchased access to a great content gathering network that will reach beyond the dead tree model that has made so much of the history of The Washington Post.

Whether Bezos will be a good proprietor is consideration for another day. Today, I’m thinking more about the bold move by someone who is expert at digital and physical distribution buying a a newspaper.

Newsagents who rely on print newspapers as a key traffic or profit generator need to understand that the world has changed. There is no upside in the future of print as a medium for news, analysis and local context yes, but not news.

Mediaweek yesterday reported on the expansion of the reach of the mX free daily newspaper:

Commuter brand mX has expanded its distribution in Sydney with the publication now available in Parramatta’s central business district.

Each day from Monday to Friday, 5,000 copies of mX are now distributed in the area.

Publisher of mX Fiona Mellor said that consumer and advertiser demand had driven the expansion: “We are following the urban sprawl. Our strategy is to be a commuter’s friend in CBD areas, engaging young professionals each day. It was critical for us to expand to Parramatta as Sydney’s second largest CBD to reach this active and captive audience.

“In addition to our recently launched mX app, we are making mX’s cheeky, irreverent and mostly uplifting writing style accessible to more Australians,” Mellor said.

This follows an expansion to Caulfield in Melbourne and Toowong in Brisbane earlier this year.

While News Limited is promoting print and digital packaged subscriptions, it feels like the real focus is the digital product since this has a considerably lower fulfilment cost for them. I’m guessing these ads are running in other News capital city titles around the country.

Encouraging migration from print to digital is what I’d be doing if I was News.

The Media pages of The Australian yesterday led with Fairfax shortens print timetable, a report claiming that Fairfax insiders leaked that the timetable of retreat from print had been shortened. Fairfax management yesterday denied the report.

This report is the type of punch that News Limited swings at their biggest competitor, Fairfax. The frequency of punches has increased recently. That the news report is freely available and not locked behind a subscriber log in says that News wants this story to reach as many eyeballs as possible. Other reports from The Australian yesterday remain hidden behind a subscription login.

It would suit News if Fairfax did make a move on the print days for its capital city dailies so its understandable that then company uses its newspapers to further its own agenda. It’s something News has done for years.

The challenge for Fairfax is that the scope of the turnaround being attempted is enormous and the diversity of the company quite narrow, requiring the benefits of the turnaround to come from diminished operations.  The company under Greg Hywood has aggressively cut costs and paid down debt, all good moves from a financial strength perspective. The unknown is where the company will end up and from a newspaper perspective, where print will end up.

The real issue for the future of the print editions is to create products people want to purchase in the printed form.  Print sales will determine when the print editions are cut as Hywood has said.  If I was in control of the print product I’d take a fresh, left field, look at the content. I’d be looking for ways to make the print product more locally relevant. It’s rare I reach for a newspaper for news. I do, however, reach for a newspaper for perspective and longer form reporting. The challenge is that as I think about that it’s obvious that such content does not need to be and probably cannot be daily.

The Age today published a good report about challenges faced by online retailers, focused on a specific example of challenges faced by bike retailers. This article drew many comments – 417 by 1pm when comments were closed. It shocks me that they would shut down comments. Okay some were off topic while others were used to push commercial agendas but most comments were contributions to a good discussions.

Comments are the lifeblood of online content. I have seen situations where comments have given otherwise missed content a stronger life.

Fairfax management charged with the online / digital future of the company ought to review their position on comments.

I saw the premiere of the Stephen King mini-series Under the Dome last night. Early in the show a resident in the town where the show is set confronts the editor of the local newspaper about a story lead. During the brief interaction the resident says she doesn’t read newspapers, that she gets all her news online. Even though it was in passing it was delivered in a biting way, as a stand out message.

Not only are we dealing with actual falling sales of newspapers, we are dealing with perception surrounding the medium.  Oh, and we’re dealing with poorly engaged publishers.

I’ve just caught up with an interview on ABC Radio’s AM last Saturday with Andrea Carson a Melbourne University lecturer in media, politics and society. In the interview, Carson says:

So I think five years’ time, it would be unlikely to still have a Monday to Friday hardcopy newspaper for Fairfax.

I think the weekends have other attractions. They’re still in the broadsheet form at the moment, and advertisers do like the weekend papers because they know that readers have more time to sit and read the newspaper over a weekend.

From what we see happening around us, moves large and small, I except to see capital city dailies start to withdraw from seven day a week publishing of print editions much sooner than five years.  This is not a new position for me, it’s something I’ve been saying for a couple of years now. What is different today is the increase in moves by publishers supporting my (undesirable) expectation.

Check out a the display of a couple of pages from The Canberra Times newspaper above the urinal in the male bathroom of hotel in Canberra where the Newsagency of the Future workshop was hosted today. You can’t do that with an iPad.

With the announcement that award-winning journalist David Marr has joined a growing stable of respected journalists, The Guardian is showing its commitment to quality journalism in advance of its launch here later this year. While Fairfax has been shedding many quality people, here’s The Guardian picking some up.

The implication for newsagents and others selling newspapers is that The Guardian represents another news outlet not relying on retailers and distributors to get news in the hands of consumers.