Those who have kept up to date with Australia’s media industry will be aware of the current strife newsprint is facing due to the disruption of digital. Newsprint’s uncertain future was thrust into the spotlight in May when Fairfax Media CEO Greg Hywood made it into his own newspaper headlines after revealing during a speech to investors the company’s long term plans to disassociate with print.
The following month, APN News & Media offloaded its Australian Regional Media (ARM) business to News Corp for $36.6m, a deal which is currently awaiting approval from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC).
During the sale, APN chairman Peter Cosgrove described APN’s future as ‘bright’ adding, “We will be a more nimble media company purely focused on growing our media assets of radio and outdoor.” And most recently this month 100 print jobs were slashed after a merger between Seven West Media’s West Australian Newspaper and News Corp’s Sunday Times resulted in the closure of the Perth Print site.
However while speaking at the annual gathering of the industry, top media bosses dismissed doomsayer’s warnings that the end of printed newspapers is near. During the CEO panel at the 2016 NewsMediaWorks Future Forum, Fairfax boss Hywood was directly quizzed on whether he sees a digital-only business model as the future of the company.
At the Future Forum, Hywood responded, “There is clearly a long life in print-based, we are not saying we are walking away from printing metro titles, it is quite the opposite. We respond to consumer demand in a manner of matching what they need and 80 per cent of our consumers access our titles with digital.
“So our organisation is now committed to moving the digital product across the western speaking world, and lifting the quality of that, and on the print side we are giving our consumers the print product they want when they have time to read it.”
The panel also addressed the current state of regional newspapers which has been a hot topic in the industry ever since APN decided to exit its ARM business. Seven West Media CEO Chris Wharton told the audience regional newspapers are ‘performing very well’ in Western Australia which is currently grappling with the mining downturn.
“They are integral parts of their community, we have a number of small communities in Western Australia where we print three to five thousand papers for those communities, but they are profitable,” Wharton says. “So my view is that regional newspapers are a very important part of our business that contributes around a quarter of our total advertising.”
Discussing News Corp’s future strategy for its Australian Regional Media business, executive chairman Michael Miller says the demand for local newspapers is booming. “We should be confident with the fact that local communities want local newspapers, and ARM is great at serving the communities in northern NSW and Queensland not just as the leading source of community information, but in most places the only,” Miller says. “Queensland is a growth market with a great future and we believe in the long term future of print, and not just in print, but in news media brands.”
However, as pointed out by panel convenor and AdNews editor Rosie Baker, the issue at the core of mass newspaper closures is declining advertising revenues. Hywood proposes newspaper businesses in future will have to enter the digital territory of Google and Facebook where he says targeted advertising can be provided from these platforms relatively easily and cheaply. Hywood also recommends newspaper giants to take advantage of their audience reach to drive advertising in other areas of the company besides print.
“What we do have are extraordinary assets called audiences, we have marketing inventory and what you can see is that the publishing companies are using that audience to drive value. For us it has been a help through [real estate website] Domain.
"Using our inventory and creating values in other ways is what we at Fairfax call a strategic stretch, creating value further down the food chain and actually making money out of the powerful component of the internet.”
Though recent events in the newspaper industry suggest newsprint has a bleak future ahead, media bosses appear to be upbeat in their support for the medium of print, but only time will tell if further declines in print advertising diminishes their positive outlook.
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