'Stop Press' Aint What It Used to Be!

By Wren Mast-Ingle

The tussle between the printed word and electronic media for the minds and pockets of audiences has taken a new turn with Jeff Bezos purchasing The Washington Post.  Significant in that he owns Amazon, the US$145-billion online retailer and even more important because he has announced that he intends to put the focus back on the reader.

His approach is a radical one in the face of a worldwide trend that shows newspapers dropping circulation on a daily basis with South Africa no exception.  Moneyweb reports that a long-term analysis of the circulation across the board shows the local publishing industry in decline with some leading publications having lost up to 30 percent since 2006.

Bezos’s back-to-basics approach of delivering a good read to its buying public ahead of today’s standard where minimal editorial is slipped in between advertising pages has raised eyebrows in the global publishing arena dominated by accountants who have little affinity or sympathy for either journalism or marketing. The Canadian philosopher of communication theory, Marshall Mcluhan was to the point in drawing attention to the fact that ‘far more thought and care go into the composition of any prominent ad in a newspaper or magazine than go into the writing of their features and editorials’.

Unfortunately it is difficult to relate profits to circulation and between the fancy footwork with some spin doctoring, the major publishing houses in South Africa report a mixed bag in this department.  One year it is a loss for some and revenues are up for others.  The next year fortunes are reversed and so it goes.

In microcosm on the local scene, it is interesting to observe some of the factors that have led up to the woes of newspapers.  If one goes back to the 70s when the Rand Daily Mail challenged the might of the Verwoerd Government and its apartheid policies.  It was a time when journalists became heroes and editors knights-in-shining-armour as the world watched them tread an extremely dangerous path.

It was a time of great journalism that helped lay the foundations for the demise of an iniquitous subjugation of most South Africans, but it was also the era that saw the beginnings of what beguiles newspapers today.  The RDM, firmly in the hands of investigative reporters and journalists who had been promoted into administrative roles as a result of their successes as writers, rapidly increased its circulation as it attracted black readers. 

Advertising rates, as everyone knows, are based on circulation figures and to the delight of RDM management, these went up with number of copies sold.  Within three years the newspaper printed it last copy.  Blame was laid at the doorstep of the Government.  However, the R1-million-a=month it was losing (and being subsidised by the Sunday Times at the time) was because many advertisers did not see value in taking space.  To these companies there was no point in advertising to an audience that did not have the money to buy their products or could not make use of their services. As a result the increased circulation was instrumental in costing the Rand Daily Mail its life.

In other newspapers around the country the trend to promote journalists beyond their area of expertise formalised a poor strategy to an economic sustainability in publishing as well as the need for marketing – an area that has always been abhorrent to journalists.  The scene was set for ‘financial experts’ to take over. 

Investigative reporting, good coverage and space devoted to editorial shrank rapidly as the ‘bottom line’ brigade took on easy-to-access news services, reduced the size of newsrooms and sub-editing departments and started cramming papers with advertising.  A corollary to this approach has seen inexperience news staff manning desks to keep costs down and tow the line when an editor takes up the post and imposes his or her personal ideas on what makes the publication work.  The editors appointed more often than not today are simply there to reflect and support the ideologies of the owners whether money or political ends…no matter how they profess interest in readers.

The other ‘bugbear’ for newspapers is the online conundrum.  Digital content is the focus of enormous interest in South Africa particularly on the part of publishers.  But according to the South African Audience Research Foundation’s All Media and Products Survey (Amps), about 50% of the adult population are newspaper readers and 48% are magazine readers, while only 22% are internet users.

To make matters worse the average reader stays on SA’s most accessed news website, News24, for only 2 minutes 9 seconds including making comments. But this does not prevent media owners pumping money and resources into digital media at the expense of print.  A typical justification for this approach is ‘people don’t have time to read anymore’.  While this may be true in part, traditional newspaper readers find little substance in, for example, the Sunday papers which are filled with regurgitated political, upheaval and disaster articles, long exhausted and largely from online and other sources.  And even if the cover price is supposed to be subsidised by advertising, it is nevertheless not value for money.

The business of publishing newspapers sees the two media giants Independent and Media24 pocketing R1-million each every day of the year while Avusa has to settle for a little under R500 000 in daily profit according to the Mail and Guardian.

Finally, quality and providing what the customer wants/needs are the two critical aspects of successful marketing.  The reader gets neither between the efforts to squeeze every cent out of the market and cost-cutting which includes the employ of inexperienced, lowly-paid staff to fill just half the posts that existed when newspapers were really NEWSpapers.

Bezos faces an uphill battle in that the woes of newspaper publishers throughout the world are basically the same.  “Part of the answer lies in getting back to basic marketing,” says Teresita van Gaalen who heads up Tvg&Associates, a corporate enrichment company with a history of turnaround and transformation successes.

“The era of accountants heading up companies that are seemingly successful because of fancy footwork when it comes to juggling figures is ending.  One is starting to see reinvestment in executives at the helm of companies with a marketing or engineering background.  These people are wealth creators, not bean counters.

“If Bezos focuses on his market – in this instance the readers – and is aggressively innovative, he will have a winner on his hands.  The bottom line however is that publishing newspapers needs to be approached like any other business.  Identify your USPs in the editorial approach and match these to a target market.  Market your product, in this instance the editorial, with appeal packaging and exceed the customers’ expectations.

“There is no doubt that increased circulation, readership and advertising will follow and so will sustainable profits – provided a reasonable balance is maintained between commercial and informative content.

“The situation is well captured by American film maker and author, Michael Moore who said: ‘A newspaper is a public trust, and we will suffer as a society without them. It is not the Internet that has killed them. It is their own greed, it is their own stupidity, and it is capitalism that has taken our daily newspapers from us.’

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Wren Mast-Ingle is a South African publisher, author and marketing strategist.  He is an affiliate of Tvg&Associates.  www.tvg-associates.co.za