Newspapers need to rethink their business
Before launching Metro, I used to work for The Big Newspaper in Stockholm, Sweden. Every time one of the subscribers decided to cancel, the subscription department called and asked why. Once a year they compiled all the answers into a nice fat report, and every year the reports told the same story.
There were two responses:
1. “I don’t have time to read the paper”.
2. “I can’t afford the paper any more”.
How do you react to that? Unfortunately, the paper still made a lot of money. “Yes, the circulation is not what it used to be, but hey, we are still the biggest daily in town!” The reaction was logical, and absurd: The Big Newspaper raised the subscription price significantly, and also decided to produce a paper with more pages.
Why logical? Well, big organisations have their own logic. Tradition, trade unions, inter-departemental envy, institutionalised stupidity, fear, vested interests, management, ties to suppliers and customers – everything and everybody that feeds off the status quo and fears change, all team up for once and work well together to fight new ideas.
If the big city newspaper managing directors spent a fraction of the time and money they pour into different internet-related projects, on the development of their core business, the newspaper, I would be more optimistic about the future of their part of the industry. As it is, I think many of us will soon have to look elsewhere for a safe job.
When radio came along, the newspapers were declared an endangered species. Then came commercial television, and the days of newspapers were numbered, according to the pessimists.
Internet, of course, has brought out the doomsday prophets once again. This time, however, they may be right. But it’s not the net that will kill the newspapers; for the cause of death we only have to look at ourselves.
The surveys have been saying the same things for decades now:
• Circulation numbers are dropping.
• The amount of time people spend reading the paper is dropping.
• Fewer and fewer young people pick up the habit of reading a newspaper.
• Readers become unfaithful: they don’t read the paper every day.
Far more daily newspapers fold than are launched these days. Swedish free-of-charge daily Metro is doing its best to reverse the trend, and competing companies copying the concept (like Lord Rothermere’s Associated Newspapers in London) are adding to the free-of-charge avalanche.
L’Ancien Régime, however, in big city newspapers all around the world, sleeps happily on.
The way to create a newspaper for the MTV-generation is NOT to design pages that seem to “hop & twirl”. The way to satisfy readers in a post-information-explosion society is NOT to write longer stories, or print thicker newspapers. The way to build readership in an increasingly nomadic, urban population that defines itself by other criteria than geography is NOT to try to re-create the “local” paper of the 1900s. We need new strategies. To get them, we need to kick out the old bosses, together with their last-century ideas.
Some thoughts for the 2000s:
• Why pay? The net has effectively taught people that news is free. Why should they have to pay for newspapers? Answer: they don’t.
• They are like you! Young people have the same need as everyone else for information. Satisfy that need, and you will get young readers.
• Time is limited. People spend 20 minutes reading the paper. Make the paper readable in 20 minutes. That doesn’t mean you have to print less than 28 pages, just that you design the whole paper in such a way that the reader can easily choose what to read – and what to skip.
• Competition everywhere. When the strategy of the daily newspaper took shape, there wasn’t very much that could count as competition. The readership turned to the daily paper for information about everything and anything. This is no longer the case. The role of the daily newspaper in the reader’s household has radically changed. Unfortunately the newspaper hasn’t changed, it still tries to contain everything.
• Mass appeal. Nowadays, as against the lifestyle of thirty years ago, there is very little time during the day that is unscheduled. To find the 20 minutes you need to read the paper is not so easy. If you want a mass audience, think mass activities. Public transport can be one way of reaching out to readers, but there are other ways.
What kind of newspaper does the internet generation need?
A newspaper that will give them the overview, the gist of what has been happening in the world since yesterday. In the world, not in the suburb where the reader happens to live, because in the era of globalisation an event in another country and time-zone may very well be more important than what was going on in the next block of low-rent housing.
What do you do if you are trying to bring a new product to the market, or to break into a market already cornered by another Big Player?
Microsoft took an old method and used it to break the Netscape browser monopoly: Bill Gates decided to give away Microsoft Explorer for free.
If you not only lower the threshold, but actually take it away, the readers will come. Whether you can keep them is another matter. To be able to do that, you also have to produce a paper they find useful and will want to return to.
Why should readers pay for newspapers at all? The news on radio and television is perceived as free. On the net there is free news everywhere. Keep people paying for the paper and sit back and watch the circulation shrink.
The Metro concept consists of several ideas combined into one. There is the journalistic concept, where design plays a (minor) role. There is the production and organisation idea, around desktop publishing tools. There is the distribution idea, the core of the budget model. And there is the marketing idea, that bridges all three.
The basic Metro concept was born during a lecture at the Stockholm School of Journalism in 1973. It suddenly dawned on me that if you found a way of circumventing the distribution costs, you could give away the daily paper for free. The costs of handling subscriptions and distribution actually ate up the income from subscriptions (about 80 percent of Swedish morning newspaper sales income is from subscription fees).
The answer was obvious. The Stockholm subway system, together with buses and commuter trains, handles almost 50 percent of all personal transport in the greater Stockholm area. Through the public transport company, we could reach the active part of the 1,2 million inhabitants on a daily basis. Not really for free, but not far from it.
The distribution department of Metro Stockholm is one (1) person. We are currently the second largest daily in Stockholm. Among readers aged 15–35 we are the largest. And, as our advertisers have realised, our readers are up and about. We do not reach people in prison, people confined to their beds, or empty homes where the inhabitants are on vacation. With Metro, every printed copy counts. We deliver live readers, not “percentage of households”.
This year Metro Stockholm celebrated its first five years. It was able to do so in the company of its younger sister papers in Gothenburg and Malmö (Sweden), Helsinki (Finland), Prague (Czech Republic), Amsterdam and Rotterdam and other cities (The Netherlands), Budapest (Hungary), Zurich (Switzerland), Rome (Italy), Newcastle (England), Santiago (Chile), Philadelphia (USA), Toronto (Canada) and Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). To be continued…
Design never saved a sinking industry. Not even good design. Maybe good ideas could, but I’m not sure this industry wants to be saved. In fact, I’m not even sure it knows that it’s sinking.
Published in the SND Design, December 2000.
There were two responses:
1. “I don’t have time to read the paper”.
2. “I can’t afford the paper any more”.
How do you react to that? Unfortunately, the paper still made a lot of money. “Yes, the circulation is not what it used to be, but hey, we are still the biggest daily in town!” The reaction was logical, and absurd: The Big Newspaper raised the subscription price significantly, and also decided to produce a paper with more pages.
Why logical? Well, big organisations have their own logic. Tradition, trade unions, inter-departemental envy, institutionalised stupidity, fear, vested interests, management, ties to suppliers and customers – everything and everybody that feeds off the status quo and fears change, all team up for once and work well together to fight new ideas.
If the big city newspaper managing directors spent a fraction of the time and money they pour into different internet-related projects, on the development of their core business, the newspaper, I would be more optimistic about the future of their part of the industry. As it is, I think many of us will soon have to look elsewhere for a safe job.
When radio came along, the newspapers were declared an endangered species. Then came commercial television, and the days of newspapers were numbered, according to the pessimists.
Internet, of course, has brought out the doomsday prophets once again. This time, however, they may be right. But it’s not the net that will kill the newspapers; for the cause of death we only have to look at ourselves.
The surveys have been saying the same things for decades now:
• Circulation numbers are dropping.
• The amount of time people spend reading the paper is dropping.
• Fewer and fewer young people pick up the habit of reading a newspaper.
• Readers become unfaithful: they don’t read the paper every day.
Far more daily newspapers fold than are launched these days. Swedish free-of-charge daily Metro is doing its best to reverse the trend, and competing companies copying the concept (like Lord Rothermere’s Associated Newspapers in London) are adding to the free-of-charge avalanche.
L’Ancien Régime, however, in big city newspapers all around the world, sleeps happily on.
The way to create a newspaper for the MTV-generation is NOT to design pages that seem to “hop & twirl”. The way to satisfy readers in a post-information-explosion society is NOT to write longer stories, or print thicker newspapers. The way to build readership in an increasingly nomadic, urban population that defines itself by other criteria than geography is NOT to try to re-create the “local” paper of the 1900s. We need new strategies. To get them, we need to kick out the old bosses, together with their last-century ideas.
Some thoughts for the 2000s:
• Why pay? The net has effectively taught people that news is free. Why should they have to pay for newspapers? Answer: they don’t.
• They are like you! Young people have the same need as everyone else for information. Satisfy that need, and you will get young readers.
• Time is limited. People spend 20 minutes reading the paper. Make the paper readable in 20 minutes. That doesn’t mean you have to print less than 28 pages, just that you design the whole paper in such a way that the reader can easily choose what to read – and what to skip.
• Competition everywhere. When the strategy of the daily newspaper took shape, there wasn’t very much that could count as competition. The readership turned to the daily paper for information about everything and anything. This is no longer the case. The role of the daily newspaper in the reader’s household has radically changed. Unfortunately the newspaper hasn’t changed, it still tries to contain everything.
• Mass appeal. Nowadays, as against the lifestyle of thirty years ago, there is very little time during the day that is unscheduled. To find the 20 minutes you need to read the paper is not so easy. If you want a mass audience, think mass activities. Public transport can be one way of reaching out to readers, but there are other ways.
What kind of newspaper does the internet generation need?
A newspaper that will give them the overview, the gist of what has been happening in the world since yesterday. In the world, not in the suburb where the reader happens to live, because in the era of globalisation an event in another country and time-zone may very well be more important than what was going on in the next block of low-rent housing.
What do you do if you are trying to bring a new product to the market, or to break into a market already cornered by another Big Player?
Microsoft took an old method and used it to break the Netscape browser monopoly: Bill Gates decided to give away Microsoft Explorer for free.
If you not only lower the threshold, but actually take it away, the readers will come. Whether you can keep them is another matter. To be able to do that, you also have to produce a paper they find useful and will want to return to.
Why should readers pay for newspapers at all? The news on radio and television is perceived as free. On the net there is free news everywhere. Keep people paying for the paper and sit back and watch the circulation shrink.
The Metro concept consists of several ideas combined into one. There is the journalistic concept, where design plays a (minor) role. There is the production and organisation idea, around desktop publishing tools. There is the distribution idea, the core of the budget model. And there is the marketing idea, that bridges all three.
The basic Metro concept was born during a lecture at the Stockholm School of Journalism in 1973. It suddenly dawned on me that if you found a way of circumventing the distribution costs, you could give away the daily paper for free. The costs of handling subscriptions and distribution actually ate up the income from subscriptions (about 80 percent of Swedish morning newspaper sales income is from subscription fees).
The answer was obvious. The Stockholm subway system, together with buses and commuter trains, handles almost 50 percent of all personal transport in the greater Stockholm area. Through the public transport company, we could reach the active part of the 1,2 million inhabitants on a daily basis. Not really for free, but not far from it.
The distribution department of Metro Stockholm is one (1) person. We are currently the second largest daily in Stockholm. Among readers aged 15–35 we are the largest. And, as our advertisers have realised, our readers are up and about. We do not reach people in prison, people confined to their beds, or empty homes where the inhabitants are on vacation. With Metro, every printed copy counts. We deliver live readers, not “percentage of households”.
This year Metro Stockholm celebrated its first five years. It was able to do so in the company of its younger sister papers in Gothenburg and Malmö (Sweden), Helsinki (Finland), Prague (Czech Republic), Amsterdam and Rotterdam and other cities (The Netherlands), Budapest (Hungary), Zurich (Switzerland), Rome (Italy), Newcastle (England), Santiago (Chile), Philadelphia (USA), Toronto (Canada) and Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). To be continued…
Design never saved a sinking industry. Not even good design. Maybe good ideas could, but I’m not sure this industry wants to be saved. In fact, I’m not even sure it knows that it’s sinking.
Published in the SND Design, December 2000.
posted by Pelle at Wednesday, December 13, 2000
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