Abstract
Idle talk in the Groucho Club costs lives, or at least half a year of my life. The great Ray Snoddy said to me at our last book launch in June 2016: “How about a book on the death of print?” An idea that had been gestating with me for a while. Idea sold.
Well that very book is now on the shelves. As you ask, it is Last Words? How Can Journalism Survive the Decline of Print? edited by Snoddy, Richard Tait, Tor Clark, Neil Fowler and me. It's the 19th in my Abramis “hackademic” series going back over the past decade. Those tomes have successfully surfed the media zeitgeist on subjects from reporting the Arab spring to phone hacking to the future of public service television.
I started as a cynic on the death of print, I finish as a sceptic. The short answer is that it is dying in big legacy areas but will survive in niche ones. Sadly, too many in the newspaper business are like Christmas Island soldiers: they see the nuclear explosion but turn their backs and hope it will not affect them. It has and it will. The facts and figures on the decline are unanswerable. They are the cornerstone of the book.
Local papers in the UK are going through the elegant charade of a last dance. Their advertising has, by and large, gone to the internet. Many of their readers found that destination too. Local rags are left trying to serve communities they treated with some disdain in the “rivers of gold” days of 40 per cent profits. Today they and their journalists are falling like so many autumn leaves. Many are coming late to the internet and often in a cack-handed way. You do not, as a local editor told me a few years back, “simply bung the paper on the internet”. Audiences are brighter and more cyber-sassy than that. The answer is simple. Local newspapers work best when they are, er, local. Ask the nonagenarian proprietor Sir Ray Tindle.
The nationals are to a greater or lesser extent in the anteroom of the same intensive care ward. The Independent has already gone to the great digital graveyard in the sky. Just the i and The New European survive as successful launches from recent years. Too many failures to name.
Print advertising revenues have gone over a cliff, digital advertising being no substitute except for Mr Google and Mr Facebook. Some have tried “digital first” as a way out of their hell; one or two have thrived in the open and a few have survived behind paywalls, porous or not. News is now expected to be free on the net as The Guardian, a pioneer of that approach, is finding to its heavy cost. How many years do you give the Grauniad as a seven-day print product? How many years the Daily Express?
What have survived the Christmas Island digital bomb, and will do, are those with a clearly defined audience, like the Financial Times and The Economist in the UK and The New York Times and Wall Street Journal in the US. People are happy to pay for them or have their companies pay for them behind the walls. Writing about money always makes money.
Big niche markets such as auto magazines are looking healthy too, but they saw the digital future long ago and shored up against it with some success. The secret is to find your niche, serve it and serve it well. Readers should then stay and pay.
Go to your local corner shop for research. Look at the newspaper and magazine shelves, increasingly threadbare. Mr Ali in Jericho, Oxford, my local cornershop, is having to build up milk sales to compensate. Our book has professional optimists from Newsworks, the PPA and National Federation of Retail Newsagents in there, banging the drum for print survival. But their beats are getting softer and less frequent. Some of them can see the Christmas Island mushroom cloud in the distance.
We did not go for the ideologues. No Clay Shirkys or Jeff Jarvises appear. One of them told me he had “no interest” in the future of print. Pretty clear and to the point.
My quartet of distinguished fellow editors – a former editor in chief of ITN, the former media editor of The Times and two former local newspaper editors, ensured some balance and kept me on the straight and narrow and away from too many wild academic theories. This co-operative worked through us all using our contacts to get the right writers and regular conference calls “peer reviewing” the book as it progressed. We reject as well as accept.
The cast list we assembled is simply stunning, from Mark Thompson, the former BBC boss, now $8m a year NYT boss, to Will Lewis to Peter Preston to Roger Parry to Peter Cole. All write pro bono. There's plenty of original academic journalism in there too. For example where journalism students come from and where they go to explored for the first time and the (non-)reading habits of journalism undergraduates revealed. They get their news from Facebook and Twitter. Test it out. I did with 42 Chinese journalism/media postgrads the other day. Not one read a printed paper each day
The end result, as with all these books, should be like an intellectual bran tub. You dip in and answer some or all the questions you ever had about the decline – nay, the not so slow death – of print. Does it come down on the side of life or death? Neither. It is a good, rigorous hackademic tome reflecting that vibrant debate. But ultimately you, the reader, decide.