The Times they are a-changing
The Independent will, in the coming month, print its last paper edition and become an online-only publication. How long before other news titles follow its lead?
The Independent newspaper, launched just 30 years ago as a broadsheet and redesigned as a tabloid in 2003, achieved headlines in other newspapers this month by being the first major title to tear itself away from newsprint entirely when it said it will print its last paper copy in March. In the 1990s, it had a circulation in excess of 400,000. Today its circulation is about 58,000. It simply does not sell enough physical copies any more to justify the cost of running a print and distribution operation.
Why this decline in readership? The answer for the Independent, and all the other newspapers, is that these are tough times for newspapers, and more and more people now get their news online. Where once the morning commute was packed with people carrying newspapers, now it is packed with people staring at their phones.
Is that the whole story? The Times is available online, but its printed version, with a cover price of £1.20, still has an undented circulation in excess of 400,000 copies, and in the field of advertising-backed free newspapers, The Metro is printing 1.3 million copies per day.
But perhaps the Times and Metro appeal to an ageing demographic and its the youngsters who are reading online and will never again use newsprint. At the start of the century, NME (New Musical Express) had a circulation of 70,000, which gradually declined to 15,000 in 2014, as more and more of the youth market found its music news online. Taking the decision to switch to an advertising-backed free newspaper, it now distributes 300,000 copies per week.
There is no doubt that online and newsprint are two very different audiences, and that printed adverts still have appeal, as opposed to the backlash against online ads. Adverts in newspapers and magazines are often seen by the reader as added value, supplementing the content of the magazine rather than encroaching on it. The record for magazine advertising probably goes to Vogue. The September 2011 edition was a colossal 758 pages, of which 527 pages (70%) were paid advertising, and yet most readers perceived it all as content.
Back to The Independent, it wants to reach a wide readership to satisfy its advertisers, and appears to be remaining as open access online, but at the same time it is offering a subscription model. Currently this is priced at £2.99 a week, (£150 per year). It is hard to find a compelling reason to take a paid subscription though. Paying subscribers get a free app which will download the edition over wifi so they can read it offline or when bandwidth is limited or patchy, such as on the commute to work, and thereby save bandwidth charges for mobile users with limited tariffs. Subscribers can also be notified about articles, and they get online versions of the crosswords and sudoku.
24th February 2016
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.