Newspapers are fond of the apocalyptic story: we are extremely good at predicting the end of things. So, it is no surprise that newspapers have been writing their own epitaphs for at least the past decade.
It was a doomsday vision occasioned by the birth of the net and buoyed by plunging telecoms costs in Western Europe and the United States. In those regions, newspaper sales have plummeted as websites break news first and provide opportunities for readers to become writers and commentators via the blogosphere.
This week’s World Association of Newspapers (WAN) conference in Cape Town showed that print is not dead, but newspapers as we know them are changing quickly.
Indeed, newspaper companies are changing quickly into news companies. The launch this week of the Times by the Johncom group is symbolic of this change of identity.
The Times is a newspaper, a website, podcasts and video clips. It is one of the first examples of a truly multimedia product and is probably the harbinger of things to come.
It is this vision that dominated the WAN and World Editors Forum meetings in Cape Town this week.
Newspaper sales growth is robust and growing in Asia (notably India), Latin America and, to a lesser extent, in Africa and the Middle East, but as internet penetration grows and bandwidth costs come down, integration of print and online will dominate the media landscape.
Online and print bring different advantages to a media stable and have therefore become interdependent, but, while they are technologically two separate entities, culturally they merge into a single creature through integration.
Fears on both sides
Questions then abound. What are the commercial benefits? What are viable newsroom strategies for integration? Will online and print naturally separate into breaking news and analysis respectively? Will the industry be characterised by multimedia journalists, or will there be multimedia content produced by medium-specific journalists? Are consumers brand loyal or medium loyal?
In the cacophony of discussion, distinct fears emerge on both sides. Print paranoia is about extinction. Online paranoia is a fight for credibility.
But Gavin O’Reilly, president of WAN, is vehement about dispelling predictions that newspapers are soon to be ”deadwood”.
”Media analysts are full of doom and gloom for the newspaper industry,” he said at the gathering at the Cape Town International Convention Centre, ”but global newspaper advertising revenues are up, in the past 18 months there are more new titles than ever before in the industry’s history and the data suggests that increased internet usage tracks increased newspaper usage.”
This, he said, proved ”the complimentary nature of print and online, despite what the doomsayers say”.
O’Reilly also feels that the future of newspapers in the digital era is not under threat because a newspaper has inherent qualities that keep it alive.
These are ultimate portability, convenience in time and place, readers’ loyalty to specific titles, wide accessibility and the fact that they’re easily disposable, but one can also ”cut and keep” them.
And, he added, a newspaper is a content-rich, non-perishable, reviewable and cheap medium. The onus, then, falls on strategists and editors to foster this ”complimentary nature” of online and print. This means in the commercial/structural sense, or within the newsroom itself.
Akishige Tada, for example, chairperson of the board of Japan’s 47 News/Press Net, described to delegates how 52 newspapers in his country had merged into a single portal — ”a unique digital news and information platform” just last year.
The advantages of this unprecedented move included greater capacity for interactivity for readers, higher advertising revenues, and the development and pooling of different forms of technology.
But according to many editors present at the WAN gathering, it is in newsrooms where integration should take place, ensuring that the newspaper industry evolves with time and technology rather than disappearing.
Fully interactive
Sunday Times editor Mondli Makhanya, speaking about the new spin-off daily the Times, said that ”from day one it was a fully interactive newspaper”, and that the journalists were being ”fully trained as multiplatform journalists”.
But, says Antonio Fernandez-Galiano, CEO of Unidad Editorial in Spain, taking a different stance, ”we should foster multimedia content but not multimedia journalists. Journalists should generate content independently, it’s fine if there’s duplication, and users can then decide what platform they like best”.
William Lewis, editor-in-chief of the Daily Telegraph in the United Kingdom, said that integrated newsrooms would only function well if leaders in the newsroom showed a passion for it, rather than exacerbating the divide between online and print.
Another question facing newspapers in the digital era is the role they should play in the context of the digital advantage of immediacy.
Richard Sambrook, director of BB Global News in the United Kingdom, said the role of newspapers should be explored in the context of online news. Speaking at the session on what user-generated content has brought to the news, he said that it primarily played five roles.
These are eyewitness contributions, integration of public opinion, breaking news, ”networking” journalism (tapping into the expertise of someone who knows on a topic than the journalist), and social media sites that connected different people and therefore acted as news tools.
But, he said: ”Analysis, explanation, context and news gathering are still very important functions, and the newspapers are the ones who do that.”
Over the next few years, it will become clearer if integration is the strategy of choice, the ways in which it is implemented, and if it works both commercially and content-wise.
And, if World Editors Forum director Bertrand Pecquerie’s predictions are correct, it is integration that will hog most of the airtime in discussions over the next decade.
Signs of the times
Johncom’s new daily Times launched this week along with its new blogging and online news platforms. The Times is distributed to all Sunday Times subscribers, which makes it one of the largest daily newspapers in the country, reports Lloyd Gedye.
Times editor Ray Hartley said the integrated nature of the new paper is essential in this day and age. ”Because it is a new paper we had the opportunity to structure the newsroom the way it should be in 2007,” he said.
The newsroom is made up of 12 pods that each contains a journalist, a photographer, a multimedia producer and an intern. These pods are allocated to a beat and they work together to produce multimedia news package for each story they cover.
”It has worked better than I ever could have expected,” said Hartley. ”I don’t think you can do things any other way in 2007.”
Rhodes University’s head of media, Guy Berger, said it was a positive move to set up a newspaper and a website in such an integrated way, when most newspapers are quite separate from their websites.
He said the Times‘s concept is fun and would appeal to readers, but he does not think it would replace other newspapers. ”It’s more of a complementary thing,” he said.
Berger said securing advertising is going to be critical to the survival of the new Johncom baby.
Anton Harber, who directs the journalism and media studies programme at Wits University, said it is too early to judge the new paper. ”I think you’ve always got to give a newspaper time to find its feet and its soul,” he said. ”So I will refrain from any hasty judgements.”
Newsroom trends
The New York Times has combined online and print departments and now has about 500 journalists in its integrated newsroom.
Die Welt in Germany has a multimedia newsroom where staff members produce both Die Welt and Die Welt Kompakt.
Denmark’s Nordjiske was the first to integrate and it did so in 2004.
At the Daily Telegraph in the United Kingdom, print and online journalists from specific beats work together, and the paper is moving to a centralised office in London later this year.
At the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age in Australia, journalists were trained to acquire multimedia skills.