Are you holding on to dinosaur droppings?

Melbourne Herald Sun, Thursday February 21, 2013

Are we coming to the end of the reading era? Is this newspaper in your hands the mere dinosaur-droppings of passing history? To listen to many pundits you would have to agree. But to my mind, the best source of research are your own eyes.

To be a good marketer you have to get out. Not in an air-conditioned Merc, but on the tram, the bus, in the supermarket, where you can watch commerce right before you.

Certainly, the morning train is no longer filled with the rustle and crumple of hundreds of newspapers. But neither are the passengers looking around them and chatting. They are all buried in their iPods, mobile phones, video games, the morning's on-air sudoku puzzle, and full-screen newspapers on their iPads.

They are reading just as fixedly as ever - some higher mathematics, some the joke pages and crosswords. The medium has changed, not the messages.

For those in the newspaper game this is reassuring news. After all those stories of print fading away, it is proving far more resilient than many thought. Just last week the figures came out giving the Audit Bureau of Circulation verdict on print sales. And yes, print circulation figures have dropped. News Limited by 5.3%, while Fairfax declined 14.8%.

But where combined figures have been obtained, it tells a different story. They are calling it the "Masthead" figure. All the publications obtained on paper, computer, iPad, phone - so long as they come under the one newspaper's title. Suddenly the figures are much more balanced. In fact the ABC was able to point to an increase in circulation. Only 0.2 per cent, but still on the positive side.

It's all changing before our eyes. The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age iPad apps have already been downloaded over a million times. So the content is still being read.

News Ltd is being quiet about its new offerings (even to me). But last week CEO Kim Williams indicated that he was not happy with traditional circulation counting. "This financial year The Readership Works will launch our sector's new readership measurement system," he announced, indicating that it was a system which will count, "Media consumption across all platforms - print, online, smart phones and tablets."

In the back rooms, the publishers are hard at work refining the screen delivery of their papers. Currently what you receive on your iPad is essentially a pdf of the paper, and it stays the same all day.

What is being developed are more interactive newspapers. So the news and pictures can update with any breaking news, stock reports, sports results. Giving papers the immediacy that perhaps they had a century ago in the days of "stop press!" and "afternoon edition".

This has already happened elsewhere. Perhaps most famously with the New York Times which now has 670,000 digital subscribers, and claims to generate more revenue from its digital base than its advertising.

These choices have given newspapers a way to slow, and in some cases reverse, circulation declines, raise prices and open up a new source of revenue. Most mportantly, it allows newspapers to reduce their dependency on advertising - always a fickle flow - and rely on more stable circulation revenue.

Around the world we are seeing more and more newspapers move behind paywalls, so eventually it will become the norm. It won't be the last of the paper product though. A fancy outfit or new car just look so much better in a big coloured print spread. No little telephone device can ever match that.

ray@ebeatty.com