If you buy a copy of a News Corp Sunday tabloid your newspaper is more than likely to come with a free paper animal collectible, a Mills & Boon iBook or a Sony Music download.
Gifts with purchase are just one way of encouraging more people to buy newspapers, which are on a steady downwards trajectory as more people consume their news online. And giveaways are not unique to News Corp.
This week the newest kid on the print block, Morry Schwartz’s The Saturday Paper, is offering a $30 Aesop voucher with a year-long subscription.
But some papers are beyond saving, no matter the promotion, as the business model they depend on has collapsed.
Last week News Corp announced that mX, its free commuter paper in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, would cease publication on 12 June, resulting in the loss of 30 journalists’ jobs.
“The decision is a reflection of the changing reading habits of commuters who now turn to their mobile phones and tablets on their way to and from work,” a company spokesman said on Thursday. “News will continue to invest in our extensive suite of print and digital products, which are purchased and read by millions of Australians every day.”
The free paper relied on advertising, and that market is shrinking fast. The amount of advertising dollars being spent on newspapers has halved in just seven years, from $1.3bn in 2007 to just $783m, according to figures from Standard Media Index.
The bad news continues in the circulation figures. According to the Australian Bureau of Circulation, mX fell from from about 100,000 daily copies in 2012 to less than 78,000 this year.
“It’s been a fun and frenetic journey for all who have had the privilege to work on mX over the years, and every single member of the mX family is gutted by the decision to pull down the curtain,” mX’s editor-in-chief, Craig Herbert, wrote.
“But no more navel-gazing for now. We’ll be getting you home with a smile on your face for the next nine working days. Thanks for picking us up and for all the genuine messages of support flooding in from our amazing readers.”
The admission of defeat on mX was in stark contrast to the confident talk, Newspapers – A Love Story, given by News Corp’s group editorial director, Campbell Reid, just a few days earlier.
“The question is not when is the internet going to kill newspapers, but why has it failed to do so,” Reid said to the company’s editors. “My contention is if the digital revolution was going to kill papers, it would have already done so, but I think the world is coming to understand the incredible duty that a paper performs in its society. We have to be a lot more aggressive and confident about what we do. It’s us who sets the agenda.”
The day after the mX announcement, news came that Rupert Murdoch’s Australian arm was effectively shutting down the fortnightly Newspoll. Plans were announced to replace its 150 researchers, statisticians and analysts with “robopolling” and online surveys.
But the publisher of Mumbrella, Tim Burrowes, whose media and marketing website tracks industry changes, says the succession of bad news for News Corp is more a sign of the end of the financial year than of the end of newspapers.
“It always feels to me that whenever we have big moves from media companies they always seem to happen at the end of the financial year so it does feel like a bit of a clearing of the decks for the next financial year,” Burrowes told Guardian Australia.
“What it does signify, I think, is a very obvious change in the newspaper business model.
“Newspapers have always been funded through advertising and through cover price. As we’ve seen advertising move away from newspapers we’ve seen them respond by jacking up the cover price.
“Whereas three or four years ago your average newspaper would cost less than a cup of coffee, now it costs more than a cup of coffee.
“So it’s gone ahead of inflation. But of course with mX, because it’s a free model, they didn’t have that lever to pull so when advertising went away from print, that left it very, very vulnerable. It’s a signal around free newspapers, not newspapers as a whole.”
Brian McNair, professor of journalism at Queensland University of Technology, also doesn’t read too much into the closure of mX.
He says the ongoing decline of print in Australia is comparable with other advanced capitalist countries, and stands at about 10% each year.
“People are moving online for their news,” McNair says. “The figures clearly show that people are consuming the news on their mobile devices, phones in particular, but I don’t see print disappearing completely.”
Burrowes blames the scarcity of advertising dollars for the closure of mX.
“The last four to five years, the amount of advertising dollars going into print around the world and certainly in Australia is on a downward path,” he says.
“One of the thresholds we just crossed in the last quarter is that the outdoor advertising industry is now bringing in more advertising dollars than newspapers.”
The latest figures show the Australian’s weekday newspaper fell 6.5% year-on-year to 104,165 copies; Fairfax Media’s Sydney Morning Herald suffered a double-digit decline of 11.3%, falling to 112,229 daily copies. The Sunday Telegraph, the country’s biggest-selling paper, fell 8.5% in the same period but still sells a relatively healthy 466,976 copies each week.
The giveaways help, and the paper is particularly good at harnessing their power. Burrowes says giveaways such as Disney characters or commemorative coins were referred to as the “crack cocaine” of the media industry in Britain.
“Clearly the ones that work really well are the ones that get people to come back,” Burrowes says. “What you’re always trying to do is encourage people to sample it that otherwise wouldn’t. Some of the giveaways around tablets when you sign up for a long-term subscription seems like really smart marketing to me.”
News Corp was giving away Samsung tablets with some 12-month subscriptions in recent months.
McNair says the market for consumer journalism is still there but people are getting it on their smartphones.
“For a time the freesheets, as they call them in the UK, became very successful at capturing a commuter market,” McNair says. “The market for commuter journalism is still there but they now have their own phone and their own iPad so why then bother with a piece of paper?
“The need for a newspaper has been replaced by the fact that you can access content from anywhere on a smartphone. Why would you want to read a cheap little news sheet that is maybe doing a very basic job?”
McNair does not believe the end of mX spells the end of newspapers.
“Clearly News Corp as a company loses money on its journalism and it makes money from entertainment. When Rupert Murdoch goes will there be the same incentive to keep the newspapers open? The theory is no,” McNair says.
“But newspapers will never die. There is a unique selling proposal for a piece of paper. There will always be some demand for print, like there is a niche market for vinyl records. Some people get joy in reading newspapers.”
