Despite the apocalypse, newspapers will refuse to die

As today's ABC figures show another decline in newspaper circulation, former Trinity Mirror executive Richard Webb argues that many will find ways to survive
IT is said that that cockroaches can survive a nuclear holocaust. While newspapers are facing the worst financial crisis in living memory, they too, are survivors and I wouldn't be surprised if many find ways to survive this trial.
Yes, their circulation revenues are under the cosh from declining sales and now advertising is suffering too. As profits plummet, the outlook is not good. Logic suggests we will soon be seeing multiple closures.
But the key to newspapers' survival is their unusual makeup: their value to society; the curious nature of their ownership; their potential for greater efficiency; their sheer ingenuity and resourcefulness; and the fact that many readers are still committed to them – according to the National Readership Survey the average time spent reading even the popular tabloids is about 40 minutes.
The intrinsic value of newspapers is helping the public understand the news. Breaking stories is, largely, a thing of the past for newspapers. Investigations, comment and opinion are their strengths. Driven by the desire to unearth controversy, free to be partisan, but checked by the need to maintain their credibility and reputations, they stretch debate and make an unparallelled contribution to our understanding of events and their importance. Newspapers still take a lead role in setting the daily news agenda for television, radio and the web. The world would certainly be a substantially less interesting and informed place without them.
The majority of owners understand this. Newspapers, generally, do not exist purely to turn a profit. Most are profitable, but a few operate permanently at a loss, such as the Evening Standard, which was bankrolled by a bigger group that has now cut its losses and sold it to a wealthy foreign proprietor. And we forget how recently newspapers became really profitable. Prior to Murdoch's coup at Wapping in 1986, life was much harder. A fraction of their current size, dominated by the print unions and often inefficient, many operated at or below break even. The proprietorial approach that kept them alive in those difficult times has not vanished completely.
It is clear that extreme profitability and durability are unhappy bedfellows. It is not surprising that the papers that deliver the highest margins generally tend to be the ones that suffer the biggest circulation declines. These are the most vulnerable and the likely candidates for extinction.
The Daily Express is an example of a paper being driven into the ground purely for profit. Its news content is similar to the freesheets – radio news on paper. What is surprising is not that it is losing readers as quickly as it is, but that it is not losing them faster. The paper has been so denuded of quality content that its eventual closure is a racing certainty. But perhaps out of habit or loyalty or because they still like it – whatever the reason – its circulation is eroding surprisingly slowly.
Papers are changing and two things are important to adapting to the new order: understanding what content is important and what is old hat and having the conviction to make big changes; and developing lower-cost models that allow them to survive the decline in income.
Recently, Private Eye gleefully told of a Daily Telegraph journalist who made a scathing attack on the editor and senior management. Reading it, I was nearly persuaded that the once great paper was turning into the quality equivalent of the Express. So I bought a copy. I was pleasantly surprised. A few of the big name columnists had gone, but it was a good read, the story count was higher than I had expected and the business section included one the best analyses of the financial crisis I have seen.
Right now the web is disrupting newspapers' traditional business model, providing the content without the cover price and yielding only a relative pittance of ad revenue so far. But newspapers have no choice but to publish online if they are to retain their profile, traffic and ad revenues. According to the Newspaper Marketing Agency, the time spent looking at the web versions of British national newspapers exceeds 700m minutes a month, putting them, collectively, in the top 10 most viewed sites, alongside the Google, eBay and Facebook.
With this kind of performance there is a future.

Source: Guardian.co.uk

Honolulu Daily Switching to Tabloid Format -- Also Cutting Staff

THE Honolulu Star-Bulletin has announced 17 newsroom layoffs, a wage freeze and conversion from broadsheet to tabloid.
Citing the need to deal with the recession, the newspaper announced the steps on its Web site.
The daily Star-Bulletin will become similar in size to sister publication MidWeek, which is also dropping its relatively new weekend edition. The Star-Bulletin joins newspapers in creating editions that use less paper and cost less to print.
In addition to cutting 17 newsroom positions, other layoffs will occur elsewhere in parent company Oahu Publications, according to Dennis Francis, company president and publisher of the Star-Bulletin and Midweek.
The paper also announced closure of its bureaus on Maui, Kauai and the Big Island as it continues to rely on its Oahu reporters and wire services.

Source: editor & publisher

Newspapers not dead yet, says Murdoch

RUPERT MURDOCH has delivered a sobering assessment about the internet as a growth engine, revealing search and advertising revenues at News Corp's Fox Interactive Media division - which houses the popular MySpace networking site - have stalled.
The new-media unit, which has invested heavily to expand MySpace, contributed just $US7 million ($10.4 million) to News Corp's $US818 million second-quarter operating income, the company said on Friday.
There was a "slight downturn" in revenue at the social networking site, Mr Murdoch said. That compares to $US179 million News Corp made from newspapers including The Wall Street Journal and information services such as the Dow Jones news wire.
Asked about his views on the long-term viability of the internet, Mr Murdoch said generating a return on investment for assets such as MySpace, which News Corp bought for $US580 million in 2005, was still a challenge.
"I think we have to find new ways to monetise our huge audiences," he told analysts. Websites reaching very specific target groups showed solid revenue increases, with the Journal's site on track to book $US120 million in advertising this year. Search sites were also doing well.
"But overall, you have a problem in that there is an almost infinite increase in inventory for websites and for display [advertising]," he said. "There is constant downward pressure on the rates you could get."
Providing more data and collecting information about web users to more effectively sell them to advertisers would be "increasingly important", Mr Murdoch said.
MySpace already uses information that members put in their profiles to target them with specific ads, which he said was showing "very promising returns".
With profits from the internet in single digits, Mr Murdoch hinted reports of the demise of newspapers were premature. That is despite hefty write-downs in the value of his papers and TV licences which resulted in News Corp's $US6.4 billion quarterly loss. "I am extremely happy with all of our newspapers," the media mogul said. "There has never been a greater appetite for news in the community. And we will be able to capitalise on that pretty well."
Newspapers have come under pressure as the global downturn has accelerated a move of high-yielding advertising to the internet. Like many of its peers, News Corp has started cutting jobs at its newspapers in Australia and offshore.
But Mr Murdoch, who copped heavy criticism for buying the Journal's parent company, Dow Jones, for $US5.6 billion in 2007, said he remained a firm believer in newspapers, television and film as mass media.
"Quite simply, as long as advertisers need to move product and sell brands, these industries will remain strong" he said. "I have got great faith and if we continue the way we are going, we may even get lucky by not having so much competition at the end of it all."
But he ruled out further print acquisitions for now. Asked about reports he was eyeing The New York Times, Mr Murdoch said that he wasn't interested.
"Apart from the German pay TV business Premiere, "I have looked around and I really haven't seen any businesses that I really want to buy", he said.

Source: smh.com.au

How to Save Your Newspaper

By Walter Isaacson - a former managing editor of TIME, is president and CEO of the Aspen Institute and author, most recently, of Einstein: His Life and Universe.

DURING the past few months, the crisis in journalism has reached meltdown proportions. It is now possible to contemplate a time when some major cities will no longer have a newspaper and when magazines and network-news operations will employ no more than a handful of reporters.
There is, however, a striking and somewhat odd fact about this crisis. Newspapers have more readers than ever. Their content, as well as that of newsmagazines and other producers of traditional journalism, is more popular than ever — even (in fact, especially) among young people.
The problem is that fewer of these consumers are paying. Instead, news organizations are merrily giving away their news. According to a Pew Research Center study, a tipping point occurred last year: more people in the U.S. got their news online for free than paid for it by buying newspapers and magazines. Who can blame them? Even an old print junkie like me has quit subscribing to the New York Times, because if it doesn't see fit to charge for its content, I'd feel like a fool paying for it.
This is not a business model that makes sense. Perhaps it appeared to when Web advertising was booming and every half-sentient publisher could pretend to be among the clan who "got it" by chanting the mantra that the ad-supported Web was "the future." But when Web advertising declined in the fourth quarter of 2008, free felt like the future of journalism only in the sense that a steep cliff is the future for a herd of lemmings. (See who got the world into this financial mess.)
Newspapers and magazines traditionally have had three revenue sources: newsstand sales, subscriptions and advertising. The new business model relies only on the last of these. That makes for a wobbly stool even when the one leg is strong. When it weakens — as countless publishers have seen happen as a result of the recession — the stool can't possibly stand.
Henry Luce, a co-founder of TIME, disdained the notion of giveaway publications that relied solely on ad revenue. He called that formula "morally abhorrent" and also "economically self-defeating." That was because he believed that good journalism required that a publication's primary duty be to its readers, not to its advertisers. In an advertising-only revenue model, the incentive is perverse. It is also self-defeating, because eventually you will weaken your bond with your readers if you do not feel directly dependent on them for your revenue. When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, Dr. Johnson said, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. Journalism's fortnight is upon us, and I suspect that 2009 will be remembered as the year news organizations realized that further rounds of cost-cutting would not stave off the hangman.
One option for survival being tried by some publications, such as the Christian Science Monitor and the Detroit Free Press, is to eliminate or drastically cut their print editions and focus on their free websites. Others may try to ride out the long winter, hope that their competitors die and pray that they will grab a large enough share of advertising to make a profitable go of it as free sites. That's fine. We need a variety of competing strategies.
These approaches, however, still make a publication completely beholden to its advertisers. So I am hoping that this year will see the dawn of a bold, old idea that will provide yet another option that some news organizations might choose: getting paid by users for the services they provide and the journalism they produce.
This notion of charging for content is an old idea not simply because newspapers and magazines have been doing it for more than four centuries. It's also something they used to do at the dawn of the online era, in the early 1990s. Back then there were a passel of online service companies, such as Prodigy, CompuServe, Delphi and AOL. They used to charge users for the minutes people spent online, and it was naturally in their interest to keep the users online for as long as possible. As a result, good content was valued. When I was in charge of TIME's nascent online-media department back then, every year or so we would play off AOL and CompuServe; one year the bidding for our magazine and bulletin boards reached $1 million.
Then along came tools that made it easier for publications and users to venture onto the open Internet rather than remain in the walled gardens created by the online services. I remember talking to Louis Rossetto, then the editor of Wired, about ways to put our magazines directly online, and we decided that the best strategy was to use the hypertext markup language and transfer protocols that defined the World Wide Web. Wired and TIME made the plunge the same week in 1994, and within a year most other publications had done so as well. We invented things like banner ads that brought in a rising tide of revenue, but the upshot was that we abandoned getting paid for content.
One of history's ironies is that hypertext — an embedded Web link that refers you to another page or site — had been invented by Ted Nelson in the early 1960s with the goal of enabling micropayments for content. He wanted to make sure that the people who created good stuff got rewarded for it. In his vision, all links on a page would facilitate the accrual of small, automatic payments for whatever content was accessed. Instead, the Web got caught up in the ethos that information wants to be free. Others smarter than we were had avoided that trap. For example, when Bill Gates noticed in 1976 that hobbyists were freely sharing Altair BASIC, a code he and his colleagues had written, he sent an open letter to members of the Homebrew Computer Club telling them to stop. "One thing you do is prevent good software from being written," he railed. "Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?"
The easy Internet ad dollars of the late 1990s enticed newspapers and magazines to put all of their content, plus a whole lot of blogs and whistles, onto their websites for free. But the bulk of the ad dollars has ended up flowing to groups that did not actually create much content but instead piggybacked on it: search engines, portals and some aggregators.
Another group that benefits from free journalism is Internet service providers. They get to charge customers $20 to $30 a month for access to the Web's trove of free content and services. As a result, it is not in their interest to facilitate easy ways for media creators to charge for their content. Thus we have a world in which phone companies have accustomed kids to paying up to 20 cents when they send a text message but it seems technologically and psychologically impossible to get people to pay 10 cents for a magazine, newspaper or newscast.
Currently a few newspapers, most notably the Wall Street Journal, charge for their online editions by requiring a monthly subscription. When Rupert Murdoch acquired the Journal, he ruminated publicly about dropping the fee. But Murdoch is, above all, a smart businessman. He took a look at the economics and decided it was lunacy to forgo the revenue — and that was even before the online ad market began contracting. Now his move looks really smart. Paid subscriptions for the Journal's website were up more than 7% in a very gloomy 2008. Plus, he spooked the New York Times into dropping its own halfhearted attempts to get subscription revenue, which were based on the (I think flawed) premise that it should charge for the paper's punditry rather than for its great reporting. (Author's note: After publication the New York Times vehemently denied that their thinking was influenced by outside considerations; I accept their explanation.)
But I don't think that subscriptions will solve everything — nor should they be the only way to charge for content. A person who wants one day's edition of a newspaper or is enticed by a link to an interesting article is rarely going to go through the cost and hassle of signing up for a subscription under today's clunky payment systems. The key to attracting online revenue, I think, is to come up with an iTunes-easy method of micropayment. We need something like digital coins or an E-ZPass digital wallet — a one-click system with a really simple interface that will permit impulse purchases of a newspaper, magazine, article, blog or video for a penny, nickel, dime or whatever the creator chooses to charge.
Admittedly, the Internet is littered with failed micropayment companies. If you remember Flooz, Beenz, CyberCash, Bitpass, Peppercoin and DigiCash, it's probably because you lost money investing in them. Many tracts and blog entries have been written about how the concept can't work because of bad tech or mental transaction costs.
But things have changed. "With newspapers entering bankruptcy even as their audience grows, the threat is not just to the companies that own them, but also to the news itself," wrote the savvy New York Times columnist David Carr last month in a column endorsing the idea of paid content. This creates a necessity that ought to be the mother of invention. In addition, our two most creative digital innovators have shown that a pay-per-drink model can work when it's made easy enough: Steve Jobs got music consumers (of all people) comfortable with the concept of paying 99 cents for a tune instead of Napsterizing an entire industry, and Jeff Bezos with his Kindle showed that consumers would buy electronic versions of books, magazines and newspapers if purchases could be done simply. (See Apple's 10 best business moves.)
What Internet payment options are there today? PayPal is the most famous, but it has transaction costs too high for impulse buys of less than a dollar. The denizens of Facebook are embracing systems like Spare Change, which allows them to charge their PayPal accounts or credit cards to get digital currency they can spend in small amounts. Similar services include Bee-Tokens and Tipjoy. Twitter users have Twitpay, which is a micropayment service for the micromessaging set. Gamers have their own digital currencies that can be used for impulse buys during online role-playing games. And real-world commuters are used to gizmos like E-ZPass, which deducts automatically from their prepaid account as they glide through a highway tollbooth.
Under a micropayment system, a newspaper might decide to charge a nickel for an article or a dime for that day's full edition or $2 for a month's worth of Web access. Some surfers would balk, but I suspect most would merrily click through if it were cheap and easy enough.
The system could be used for all forms of media: magazines and blogs, games and apps, TV newscasts and amateur videos, porn pictures and policy monographs, the reports of citizen journalists, recipes of great cooks and songs of garage bands. This would not only offer a lifeline to traditional media outlets but also nourish citizen journalists and bloggers. They have vastly enriched our realms of information and ideas, but most can't make much money at it. As a result, they tend to do it for the ego kick or as a civic contribution. A micropayment system would allow regular folks, the types who have to worry about feeding their families, to supplement their income by doing citizen journalism that is of value to their community.
When I used to go fishing in the bayous of Louisiana as a boy, my friend Thomas would sometimes steal ice from those machines outside gas stations. He had the theory that ice should be free. We didn't reflect much on who would make the ice if it were free, but fortunately we grew out of that phase. Likewise, those who believe that all content should be free should reflect on who will open bureaus in Baghdad or be able to fly off as freelancers to report in Rwanda under such a system.
I say this not because I am "evil," which is the description my daughter slings at those who want to charge for their Web content, music or apps. Instead, I say this because my daughter is very creative, and when she gets older, I want her to get paid for producing really neat stuff rather than come to me for money or decide that it makes more sense to be an investment banker.
I say this, too, because I love journalism. I think it is valuable and should be valued by its consumers. Charging for content forces discipline on journalists: they must produce things that people actually value. I suspect we will find that this necessity is actually liberating. The need to be valued by readers — serving them first and foremost rather than relying solely on advertising revenue — will allow the media once again to set their compass true to what journalism should always be about.

Source: Time.com

Technology still biggest challenge for UK regional press, say editors

TECHNOLOGY is the biggest challenge faced by the UK regional press, the editor of the Lancashire Evening Post (LEP) told a Society of Editors meeting yesterday.
Newspaper publishers are 'still struggling with systems and workflows', Simon Reynolds told the group.
This week the LEP began the introduction of a new content management system, Escenic, as part of centralisation plans for sub-editors and picture desks at its north west titles.
More needs to be done by the society to promote knowledge-sharing about technology in the newsroom and how it is being implemented, he said.
The meeting of the north west branch of the society, held prior to the Digital Editors Network event, was organised in reaction to the swingeing job cuts affecting the industry.
The very notion of the editor, which the society represents, is under threat, as titles are increasingly being merged under one editorship, added Richard Catlow, chairman of the branch and former editorial director of MEN Weekly Newspapers.
What help the society can offer editors in the current downturn was also discussed, with more localised meetings and trips to working newsrooms using new technologies suggested.

Source: journalism.co.uk

Major publishers planning to ditch online ad networks

MAJOR publishing companies are considering dropping ad networks and bringing their online display advertising sales in-house to gain closer control of their inventory and data, new media age understands.
A number of publishers have engaged in conversations to end their deals with ad networks, according to industry sources.
It's understood newspaper publishers in particular are building internal teams to sell their remnant inventory, rather than putting it through networks, as they look for ways to grow flagging revenues.
Likewise, other publishers are considering working with fewer networks so they can collaborate more closely on their online ad sales strategy with one or two partners.
The Guardian has never used ad networks and works with platform developer Adify to develop vertical ad network propositions.
The move by additional UK publishers would echo events in the US last year that saw ESPN stop using ad networks.
Jeremy Mason, European MD of behavioural targeting network Revenue Science, said the moves were imminent. "Publishers are looking at taking things in-house, setting up teams to act as network sales teams," he claimed.
A director of digital publishing at a newspaper group hinted towards the shifting market. "Although we're still using ad networks, our focus is on our own sales to agencies and clients," he said.
Another media industry source said, "Premium publishers want to take as much control of their inventory as possible since they know how to sell it best.
"Premium publishers spend a lot of money creating compelling and original content that brings visitors to their sites frequently. Giving that inventory to a network could be seen as devaluing the effort," they added.
Gary Cole, ITV's online sales director and chair of the AOP's commercial working group, said the trend wasn't on the agenda of AOP members but suggested publishers were looking more closely at their relationships with ad networks.
"Inventory management is now a sophisticated part of commercial strategy and this will mean deeper, fewer relationships," he said.

Source: Newmediaage

Financial Times to axe sports coverage

THE Financial Times is dropping sports coverage and cutting its page count as part of a cost-cutting drive.
An FT spokesman said the Saturday sports page would be dropped from 14 February as "part of a strategy to focus on core strengths" of news and business.
"We will, of course, continue to cover the business of sport, as well as major sporting events and Simon Kuper's weekly column will also be moving to a new home," he added.
The FT is to reduce pagination in the UK edition by two pages, removing a page on world stock markets in addition to the sports page. The print edition is to retain the world top 500 stocks but the rest will go online.
In its four other editions – the US, Asia, Europe and the Middle East – pagination will not fall and the sports page will be replaced with other content.
The newspaper invested in sports coverage in the 1990s but has cut back under the editorship of Lionel Barber. Sports reporting has been limited to Saturdays since an April 2007 redesign.
The FT refused to confirm how the move would affect staff, but the paper acknowledged it would reduce its commissions from freelance contributors, who include Huw Richards, Graham Otway and Pat Butcher.
Last month, the Pearson-owned newspaper announced it was planning to make 80 job cuts, including 20 journalists. The National Union of Journalists has attacked Pearson for planning compulsory redundancies at the FT, despite also announcing its financial results would beat expectations.

Source: Guardian.co.uk

How Not to Save Newspapers

MICROPAYMENTS are the future of content! If I had a nickel for every time I heard that one. Walter Isaacson, a former managing editor of Time, is the latest to pick up this tired banner.
In Time's latest cover story — which you can read without charge on the World Wide Web — Isaacson writes that publications cannot rely on advertising revenues alone, and should get their readers to pay per article instead:
A person who wants one day's edition of a newspaper or is enticed by a link to an interesting article is rarely going to go through the cost and hassle of signing up for a subscription under today's clunky payment systems. The key to attracting online revenue, I think, is to come up with an iTunes-easy method of micropayment.
We ought to cheer the notion that publications will try to start charging for content online. Writers at ad-supported publications will pay the fees and deliver crisp summaries and analysis for free. Outlets which charge will end up reduced to the business of trade publications, which only manage to extract money from people who need the information for their job.
That's pretty much what Time did in its early years, when it was a fancy printed blog. Editors there subscribed to the New York Times and other papers, and wrote up a weekly digest, which Time's founder, Henry Luce, then sold for rather less money than one would pay at the newsstand for all their sources.
But we have to wonder where Isaacson got this idea? Here's a hint: In 1995, Josh Quittner, whom Isaacson had hired the year before, wrote an essay about "Way New Journalism" for the online arm of Wired. Quittner wrote:
Nearly two-thirds of the cost of putting out a newspaper or magazine is the cost of printing it (paper, ink, printing presses) and distributing it (trucks, delivery folks, mail). Uncouple the content from the production and distribution costs, and you see the kind of cash we're dealing with here. Introduce the possibility that by the end of the decade, 100 million people will be on the Net. Now, give those people the technical ability to pay 3 cents for each and every story they read. If only 1 million people read, say, one Time story on O.J. Simpson, that's US$30,000. Pretty soon, you're talking about real money.
When Quittner noted that the technical infrastructure for such micropayments was missing in 1995, it was true. When Wired repeated the claim a year later, it was still true. But when Isaacson mouths the verity in 2009, he makes a fool of himself. He writes that PayPal does not accept micropayments; in fact, it does. Amazon.com lets anyone build their own micropayments service using its billing engine. The existence of 99-cent iTunes songs and 10-cent text messages show that consumers are willing to pay small amounts for digital content.
The problem with micropayments is not technology. It's that consumers are fundamentally uninterested in paying per article. Isaacson dismisses the problem of "mental transaction costs," but it's quite real. It's almost impossible to determine the value of an article before you read it. And the amounts we're talking about — 3 cents? 5 cents? 10 cents? — aren't worth the time it takes to decide how much one is willing to pay.
The advocates of micropayments also forget the basic law of supply and demand. Editors today increasingly talk about "commodity news" — the numbingly same mass of articles written about the same news event, adding nothing to the reader's knowledge. Why would anyone pay for those? The snobs of print media also forget that they have long competed with free radio and television news broadcasts. The news will come out, one way or another. It's the classic vanity of writers to think that they have created the one perfect story that exceeds all others. The clear-minded statistics of Web usage quickly reveal this as a delusion.
Quittner (who, full disclosure, was my boss for six years at Time and Business 2.0 and talked about micopayments incessantly) was right to note the liberating effect of getting rid of the costs of print media. But he was wrong about how we'd pay for it.

Source: Vallewag

The Times cuts Saturday price to £1

THE Times: launching a £2m advertising campaign to plug its new six-section Saturday edition

News International is to slash a third off the cover price of its Saturday edition of the Times to £1 for a limited period as it launches a TV advertising campaign.
The temporary move is understood to be for an initial two weeks but could be extended beyond that. It will make the Times by far the cheapest quality Saturday newspaper and recalls the Times price war of the 1990s.
The price reduction forms part of a £2m advertising campaign to plug the new six-section Saturday edition of the Times, which launched last month.
The campaign will include outdoor posters and three weeks of television and radio ads that start today. The TV campaign will see three short ads run over a single break.
News International will also run a sampling campaign, distributing free copies of the paper with partners Marks & Spencer, Pizza Express, Picture House and the National Theatre.
"The reason we are doing this is because they are pleased with the relaunch that they want it to be trialled as widely as possible," a News International executive told MediaGuardian.co.uk.
"It is quite a step change from what we were doing before."
The decision to beef up the Saturday Times, which has traditionally been eclipsed by the Sunday Times, was taken at board level by News International.
Eleanor Mills, the new editor of the Saturday Times, was recruited by Times editor James Harding on the strength of her proposals for the relaunch, which included a broadsheet review section, a pocket-sized listings guide called Playlist and a revamp of the Saturday magazine.
News International believed that if it didn't beef up the Saturday Times, it would lose readers attracted to the Weekend FT and the Saturday Guardian.
The relaunched paper provoked a big response from readers, with more than 1,000 emails to the paper and the Feedback editor.
The price cut contrasts with News International's move last month to increase the cover price of its weekday edition of the Times by 10p to 90p.
Currently, the Saturday editions of the Guardian, the Telegraph and the Independent all cost £1.60. The Financial Times costs £2.30 on a Saturday.
After the promotion The Times is expected to return its Saturday edition to its current price of £1.50.

Source: Guardian.co.uk

Media Revolution: Stop Press?

Newspapers are facing tough times.

OVER the last decade, the UK's favourite dailies have lost some 2.25 million readers.
Falling circulations mean less money through the till and newspapers' other main source of income - advertising - is also drying up.
In the last 10 years, ad revenues have fallen by about 20%.
In the struggle to stay profitable, newspaper companies are cutting staff, closing offices and, in the case of local papers, ditching titles.
Some within the industry predict that within the next 10 years we could even see one or two of Britain's best loved dailies go to the wall.
These problems are partly caused by the economic downturn.
Advertising is one of the first things companies cut spending on during a recession and cash-strapped consumers may see newspapers as a luxury they can do without when times are tough.
But it is our changing lifestyles that pose the biggest problem for papers.

Digital Difficulties

The internet has made it easier than ever for us to find out the news
At the click of a button, we can catch up on the latest stories in whatever form we choose - text, audio or video.
Newspaper proprietor Rupert Murdoch, chairman of NewsCorp, owns papers all over the world including The Sun and The Times in Britain and The Wall Street Journal in the US.
He says the internet has given readers much more power,
"Everybody wants choice and thanks to the personal computer, people are taking charge of their own lives and they read what they want to read or what they are interested in and young people today are living on their computers," he says.
"The world is changing and newspapers have to adapt to that."
After a slow start, most newspapers are now embracing the web as a platform for reaching readers, but it seems it is even harder to make profits from online publishing than from old-fashioned newsprint.
With so many free news sites to choose from, no one seems prepared to pay money to read newspapers online.
That means they have to rely on web adverts to generate income for their sites.
But it is not straight forward. Online, advertisers have many more spaces to choose from, making the market much more competitive.

Online opportunities

But it is not all bad news.
The web also opens up new opportunities for papers.
On the internet, newspapers are freed from the shackles of print, allowing them to exploit other forms of media, such as audio and video.
Papers such as The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph increasingly see themselves as online news providers first and news papers second.
This means radically new ways of working for journalists, but readers seem to like the results.
The Guardian's website, for example, now attracts more than 20 million users a month.
Surprisingly, two thirds of those hits come from overseas, opening up potentially lucrative opportunities in international advertising.
Guardian Media Group's Editor-in-Chief Alan Rusbridger has a long-term target to triple the Guardian's US-based readership.
"You then start getting on the radar of American advertising agencies, in which case you're into a very big market indeed; the biggest most wealthy market in the world," he says.
And Rupert Murdoch anticipates that new digital devices in the pipeline will provide papers with further opportunities to make money.
"I don't think it's available in England yet, but there's a wonderful new machine called the Kindle," he says.
"You can store six or 10 books in it or you can have a newspaper subscription on it and you get every word of the newspaper for a subscription rate.
"And it's mobile. You don't need to plug it into anything. It all comes over the airwaves."

Evolve and prosper

Newspapers are in a difficult transition.
They have to weather the economic downturn and at the same time find funds to invest in the digital opportunities of the future.
But despite the tough challenges facing the industry, it looks as if newspapers are here to stay.
"Many people say newspapers are going to die. I don't think newspapers will die because they are the best way, or one of the best ways along with TV, of reaching large sections of the population," says Sir Martin Sorrell, chief executive of advertising agency WPP.
"That's not going away."
Those papers that embrace change the fastest will be best placed to survive and prosper.

Source: BBC