Across print and digital, newspaper customers are turning away

It’s inevitable Fairfax will go to full paywalls. Advertising revenue is declining. There is not much they can do except cease print editions, which has been losing money, and set up a paywall and hope & pray the existing userbase will continue to use their sites, or simply divest themselves from the newspaper business altogether and buy into other forms of media such as tv and radio.

if it makes you feel any better, and it won’t, I got my online subscription for free as an advertiser. Ironic.

Don’t suppose you could make that subscription table expandable by clicking? As it is, it’s almost impossible to read on a desktop screen. Thanks!!

I’m clearly one of the few bucking the trend, particular in terms of magazine readership (albeit digital mags).

I read more magazines and papers than I ever have. As well as the full suite of weekend papers that are delivered, and the daily, I read both major Victorian papers online. Plus with Zinio and others I’m subscribing to far more magazines than ever.

Yes. The hoops to jump through to set up a digital subscription are ridiculous. I gave up and just used incognito in my browser and didn’t bother renewing my digital subscription when it lapsed. I doubt I’m alone

I just ended my subscription and it was as difficult as you describe.

I was offered all kinds of deals to stay, but refused.

The content is terrible. A few decent stories and then fluff pieces about why we should stop talking about Robin Lawley’s body.

So many of my wonderful, intelligent friends have been made redundant by Fairfax and it shows.

How are Chrome’s Incognito sessions incorporated into web analytics? Could it be artificially increasing (albeit on a small scale) their Users/UBs/UAs?

The fact is newspapers lose on every metric:
• The news is slow.
• The news is not news – often regurgitated PR or copied from overseas
• The opinions are what the owner wants to push their own agenda
• Investigative journalism is dead
• There are far better blogs out there

The fact is the industry is about to have its Kodak moment and those who run it are too wedded to the past to see it.

The growth of free online alternatives, such as The Drum and other ABC content, makes it difficult to convince casual readers to pay for a subscription. Perhaps the ABC should be scaled back to more basic offerings, to give the struggling commercial alternatives a fighting chance.

Where is the Daily Telegraph in the table?

There are two things worth noting here. One is that the Fairfax editorial strength is a remnant. The next generation of McClymonts have gone or are going, just as Linton Besser has done. Management has zero focus on product and is largely resigned to accepting whatever the latest insight is from Corbett’s consultants.
The other thing worth noting is that the Fairfax digital product remains in the hands of infants who are eiher completely absorbed with tech fashion or, worse, are tryin to run everything on data (hence the idiotic processes and messaging that no professional would allow to be sampled in wireframe let alone released to the world).
The core problem at Fairfax is the people at the top and they are killing it faster than either News or the technology disruptors.

So agree about the Fairfax subscriber ‘services’ – they’re decidedly anti-user. I also subscribe to the AFR online – any query leads to a foreign help desk, and average response time (eg a question about account payment) is at least a week. They even send an automated email saying, “We haven’t forgotten you!” – as if that disguises the appalling lack of resources and response.

” Why do people talk about Nine – market cap $1.7bn – buying Fairfax? Given the comparative capitalisations, shouldn’t it be the other way round?”

Smaller companies take over larger companies all the time, look at the speculation of Glencore making a takeover for Rio for example (a smaller company that’s also in much more debt).

Tim,

Thanks for an interesting read – Why is it that publishers seemingly can’t find ways to innovate and care about the reader and subsequently the content those readers consume so more of us could become ‘rusted on’?

Subscribers are sent generic ‘front pages’, interests aren’t catered for and there’s an assumption that they’re too big to fail.

I’m generally perplexed, surely if they spent less time ‘massaging’ figures and more time understanding customers and building content (robust, with integrity, for a defined audience) they could turn this around.

I just can’t figure out, is it historical ‘church and state’ debates, a reluctance to change, an arrogance looking at where they have been, fear of losing short term revenue vs long term goals?

There’s plenty of smarts at News and Fairfax – the results really don’t demonstrate that though, as much as papers are ‘dying’ or in decline or whatever, these compainies are killing them.

Yes, Fairfax has a problem – but not so all newspapers. It is a pity to tar them all with the one brush. Many small community newspapers like mine are doing OK, thank you very much. While I suppose anyone could always do better, we continue to deliver effective advertising to our clients, most of whom are small local businesses with local clientele, and which don’t need their message to be spread over a wide area, or need to pay for that. The corner butchery needs to advertise its sausages, the local plumber needs to advertise her availability. We deliver clients to them, effectively and economically.

Hey Chris, is your “I just can’t figure out, is it historical ‘church and state’ debates” comment a way of pushing native (or advertorial in oldspeak). Don’t see how that would engage readers, or do advertisers know more than journos?.

Tim, where is SA’s The Advertiser?

Can someone plz tell various levels of government what a waste of ad-spend print is?

Corporate welfare by stealth.

Perhaps, if the newspapers presented “news” instead of puffery, owners opinions and press releases, then perhaps people may vlue them and pay for the hard or soft version.

As it stands, newspapers are filled with advertorials and information that is worng, out of date or biased.

Murdoch said 2030 was the end, sadly hes right again, as they are now, papers will be gone by 2030

Hey Crizza,

Not really an advertorial/editorial debate – more a comment on how they are set in their ways – I don’t think we should advertorialise the book (not that you couldn’t place relevant ads on the right pages, that’s hardly offensive – I just think historical “this is the way its always been done” is how they make decisions rather than asking “how can we?”

An unwillingness to change. As much as papers are declining, the publishers are killing them.

You must be doing well if you can afford the rent I that building!

As a daily purchaser of the SMH (despite my tag), all I can say is consider the print alternatives! And I pay full whack since there are no deliveries when I live in Port Macquarie. The early deadlines are sometimes embarrassing compared with the Telegraph’s, but if you want up-to-the-minute news there are alternatives. Another gripe, despite paying $15 a week for the paper (much more than a subscription via delivery), I don’t get free access to the website. But then, as someone ahead of me said, that appears to be run by infants anyway.

If Fairfax goes under. . . what will you have to write about? We need to do more to protect Australian publishing or we will have nothing but international publications.

How are the Mumbrella online figures going?

I think the mistake the newspaper industry has made with paywalls is to try and force people into an all you can eat arrangement in the form of lengthy subscriptions. This approach is simply irrelevant in the context of digital media and digital fragmentation for the not yet rusted on. What happened to micro-payments? With better strategy the traditional mastheads could have transitioned to the premium end of the digital market but instead they’ve double fisted themselves by offering an inflexible product and engaging in a race to the bottom in terms of content.

I worry that if newspapers and their digital personas fail who will be left to report on the news of the day? Yes there are some incredible blogs out there, producing excellent content, but it’s often quite specialised content. Who will cover the courts, parliament, local councils etc?
The problem is that the ad revenue has gone to Google (a company which apparently doesn’t pay its share of Aussie taxes) and to Facebook but neither actually invest money into reporting news.
It’s very easy to criticise the news organisations we have but who will you criticise when they’ve gone? And where will the ‘aggregator websites’ be without the organisations whose content they often pinch?
The other scary thing to watch are the most read story lists on the big news sites … it seems we’re headed to a future of stories about skateboarding mice and mutant pigs.

This might be an old idea, but make digital content worth while and cheap. And on print editions I prefer them , but instead of raising the price.

For example when the local paper here raised the price of the Sunday version to 2.50 I cancelled it. along with quite a few other people.

They tried dropping the price of the weekday issue a few years ago to $1.00, that worked but it has slowly crept back up again to $1.30…any more and I will just cancel.

Don’t forget that every second story is negative manipulated content. Depressing for the customer and too melodramatic for an educated reader

why all the hand wringing? ice deliverers and shit collectors, gone. buggy wheel manufacturers, gone.

so a 20th century business model goes the way of chimney sweeps.

it’ll be replaced by something better if history is any guide. stop worrying about it.

The age printing centre closed last year or so and now their are printing The Age in Ballarat in a smaller plant the had to cut the numbers of papers printed that is why the circulation dept. Is pushing the customers to join the digital version. It will not work .

Such a long article. And so very, very boring. I confess I didn’t read past the first few paras. Is anyone shocked that hard copies across the board are declining? It is such a natural progression from off to online. Oh the poor journos – NO – good journos will ALWAYS do well – its not the platform, its the content, stupid.

I am a news junkie. But newspapers are dead. They blew it. They had the chance to keep a small hardcore readership like me who would pay but in their insane belief they could find new younger readers went downmarket, hired 18 year olds with no institutional knowledge as reporters and treated us as idiots with short attention spans.
After a lifetime of news obsession, I don’t buy or read papers, don’t read local online sites and have stopped watching TV news which is next for extinction. My Facebook and Twitter friends alert me to anything I need to know.

Hasn’t Murdoch pretty much Destroyed Main Stream Media for everybody – I mean I would come here, e.g, first.

You can get nearly all the exact same smh / Age content for free at brisbanetimes.com.au- minus a couple of local stories. And there are no plans to introduce a paywall for that site. So why would anyone take up a digital subscription?

We’ll in Adelaide why would you pay for a digital subscription to the advertiser which only comes out with 1 or 2 decent unique articles and the occasional good opinion piece when you can read the excellent indaily.com.au for free and get all your other news from the abc news website

While I occasionally skim the advertiser because there’s a copy at work but there’s not enough in there that would make me want to spend money on it

I can only imagine that the idea of the early deadline for the print version is to force people online to get all those things that have happened in the evening that aren’t in the paper. But there’s a million sources of that news, and the conversion rate of print SMH readers to online SMH readers using that technique must be negligible. Anyone who wants to read the news in a newspaper is just being forced to buy The Australian or their local Murdoch tabloid.

I am a Fairfax fan and still think the content is really good. I get a 7-day print delivery and digital access. It is a significant saving on the shop price and well worth it. I think the key reason Fairfax print circ has declined so much (although as we know, ALL papers have declined) is the significant cover price increases over the last few years from $1.20 to $2.50 for M-F. Their competitor is almost half that price. But that was a business decision they claim is paying off in terms of increased profitability. If I was on the Fairfax management team I’d be pushing the savings that can be made from print & digital subscriptions, and why not bundle a discounted Stan subscription into the package?

Let’s also not forget, as I often point out on these boards because I don’t think it is recognised enough — the Sydney Morning Herald is still the most-read publication in Australia, according to EMMA. They beat the Tele by about a million readers. Most of this comes from digital. The Tele’s website rarely even makes the top 10.

Is Rupert Murdoch’s emotional connection with his rag’s, going to be their down fall? (As well as of course the trends we see affecting all print and digital news houses.)

Murdoch aggressively peddles his agenda and people are seeing through this, in the vastly more transparent world that exists today.

Will he get the flick and News Ltd becomes a bit more of a democracy, in terms of the management structure? Today Rupert is firmly in charge, down to the yield of the ad’s in the Daily Tele. believe you me he is, as he is in every country where he operates. Of course, when it came to the phone hacking payments, he conveniently wasn’t over the p&l…….

“I recommend washing your hands before reading if you’re the 19th in that queue.”
I’d wash my hands after too.

To paraphrase Mel Gibson: I didn’t leave Newspapers. Newspapers left me.

The pricing models for the papers are the problem … papers have always operated in a bloated environment and this fuels how they still believe access is worth $25-30 a month when Netflix is $8 and Stan is $10.

Consumer options

– all the recorded music in the world on demand for $10
– the majority of filmed content in the world for $10
– one newspapers content for $25-30

The pricing model just seems like a relic. The amount of indulgence the newspaper world seems to want to entertain is still out of control. The Australian Media Section is one example, most op-ed in the AFR is another.

Ok, hands up if you read a newspaper, are under the age of forty, and do not work in advertising?

Fairfax results reflect the fact that audiences are lost. Fairfax is trying to pump up the Domain “brand”, which is really just a carve out of real estate. But in doing so they highlight the fact that the remaining revenue in SMH, Age, CanTimes, AFR etc is largely unprofitable. Of course, most of that is print ads. So they can’t switch to digital for a profitable future.
The total collapse of these brands in terms of product quality is tragic.

Stan’s 100, 000 customers at 10 bucks a month divided by 2 (half goes to NEC) is a 6 million dollar a year business.

not taking into account royalties on the content, that might just be enought to cover 1 or 2 C level salaries at FXJ

Try subscribing to the UK Telegraph and it’s such a chore I gave up after an hour. Same with the UK Sunday Times and the same with the SMH. Yet The Australian got their digital subscription down to a tee several years ago and it’s there waiting on my computer for me in the morning.
I really want to subscribe to Fairfax but it’s such an ordeal I gave up.

I have a fewl free newspapers apps on my smart phone for basic news items during the week, the Daily Mail, the Guardian etc. I also have one or two paid for apps which give a slightly broader content offering. I also purchase the New York Times International on my kindle e reader 2,3 or 4 days per week depending on how much time I have to read it. I also buy the excellent London Times and Sunday Times a couple of times per week on Kindle. The only real ‘hard copy’ newspaper I buy these days is the Weekend Australian. Digital journalism is just so much easier to carry around with you, it’s a far more convenient platform.

I find some of the mainstream Australian newspaper smart phone apps don’t work very well so I don’t use them…

Firstly thanks for allowing me to comment.
Fairfax and Murdoch rarely allow such luxury.
Am an avid newshound and Google News sounded the death knell
for my print-buying. It can direct you to a wide variety of news sources shorly after the event occurs.
Fairfax has a pink agenda which can be off-putting to family types.
Michael West though does some great investigative pieces.
Murdoch’s style seems hell bent on bullying politicians into submission rather than entertaining readers.

The Australian is the encyclodepia of newspapers. The daily tele is fully of balanced, non commercial journalism. Both papers are credible and help inform the wider society.

😮

Why on earth should either of these papers be struggling?

@wide eyed and helpless –

Because, those media owners/publishers actually believe what you have written and assume that the public is as media stupid as it was 50 years ago.

@ wide eyed and helpless

My father in law rates The Australian as the ‘Rolls Royce’ of Newspapers. He has been institutionalised by years of propaganda by the Murdoch press and the ‘policy for the bigots and bogans’ strategy they emit. He is actually quite smart, however it is in his blood now. Very sad.

Will Murdoch’s influence subside due to digital channels and social media? Are then any credible studies or insights and forecasts around this?

Are there any*