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Time divides, ads subtract, and it's hard to sum up(Observer (UK) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Here's the big picture, as painted last week by the World Association of Newspapers with its annual survey of trends in 70 countries. Blue skies; black clouds. Globally, you can see a certain stability. Print circulation up 2% on 2013: 2.5 billion people reading a paper every morning (and 800 million following online): Asia, Latin America and Africa still growing strongly. But sales in North America are down 10.25% over the last five years - 23.02% in Europe. Print advertising has slithered 29.6% in America over the same half-decade, and 17.9% in Europe. Mr Micawber would know what to say about that. Of course digital ads grow and grow, up 47%. But it is still a relatively puny slice of the digital ad whole, most of which is gobbled by Google: the worst delusion is counting only newspaper sites as "news" when the great aggregators snaffle so much. In fact, 93% of newspaper revenues cited in the survey come from print - from ads or via constantly rising, sales-destroying cover prices. The revenue gap is a grand canyon opening wide. And so is the evolving debate about what papers, if any, can survive another few years in Death Valley. This argument is light-centuries away from the old world of checks and balances. Forget wondering whether great papers like the New York Times can save themselves. That's a so-last-month question. Begin to ask rather whether any conventional newspaper, offering all the conventional news and features and sport and commentary we expect, has a long-term future when every one of those interests, and more, can be separately streamed at the twitch of a finger. A landscape where it's not necessary to bring all those resources together in one bundle arranged by top-down editors. The emerging question, then, is the toughest of the lot: Would anyone today invent "a newspaper" - or news magazine for that matter - when Vice, Vox, BuzzFeed and the rest, morphing constantly, can meet the instant demands of the marketplace? Look at Gawker, a growing smorgasbord of opportunities that the heavy battalions of tradition can't seem to match. And you can already see signs of surrender. Take Time Inc, the mightiest US magazine empire, just floated away by Time Warner so that cable and movies can power forward untroubled by print's perceived problems. The Murdoch division, as it were, but with one difference. Rupert Murdoch freed his print interests from debt. He gave them a legacy. But Time Warner has saddled its mags offshoot with $1.3bn of red ink - and the need to cut 25% of its staff costs immediately. A total hospital pass. It is as though the new venture has been doomed to fail from day one, a self-fulfilling prophecy of destruction. Which is where that question comes in. The easy answer is that no, nobody in America or Europe would start a newspaper today. The more difficult answer, though, takes up the WAN survey's fears about revenue gaps and spreads them more broadly. For the revenue gap has a digital drag as well. It's infernally difficult to trawl through opaque, often private, accounts and see which of the digital news startups is making good money. Many (like the Huffington Post) talk buoyantly about profitability "later this year". BuzzFeed may take $120m in annual revenue, but you can't quite be sure what expansion costs. Gawker could be worth a lot - or just $30m, in one expert opinion. Meanwhile the venture capital fountain flows. But the difference between expectation and delivery remains: and so does a canyon that must be bridged. The problem for journalism is that we're not here, or there, but somewhere in between. (c) 2014 Guardian Newspapers Limited. |