Here’s a cautionary tale of decline and fall, of an industry wrecked by change and heading for the cliff edge. Ah! you mean newspapers, caught in the vice of digital advance. Jagged cliffs and storm-tossed wrecks have been omnipresent metaphors since the latest Daily Mail group six-monthly results showed print ads down 13% in a year. Sound a resounding profits warning. Look at the cost-cutting Guardian and pretty brutal Telegraph hackings, too. The Barclays must be thinking of a quick sale as the prophets of newsprint doom gather.
But enough of that for the moment, because we’re talking movie, not press, history – going back 70 years to a Britain with 4,700 different cinemas and 1.64bn admissions a year. And we all know what happened after that. TV happened. Within three decades, the number of cinemas had shrunk to less than 2,000. After four decades, those 1.64bn tickets were down to a mere 54m. Beachy Head didn’t come more precipitous than that.
Yet a variety of last-minute parachutes suddenly opened. People didn’t want to sit in their front parlours night after night, watching TV. They wanted to go somewhere, do something. And suddenly there were new cinemas, different environments to draw them in. Once, within a two-mile radius of where I live in south London, I could find five single-screen movie houses. And then there were none: replaced by jeans supermarkets, bingo halls, revivalist churches, blocks of flats.
Except that today – same radius – you have 19 screens to choose from in the age of the multiplex. Which fits pretty well with the picture painted by the UK Cinema Association and the British Film Institute. Only a decade ago,there were 3,486 screens around Britain. Now there are 4,185. Only a decade ago, movie house annual revenue was £762m. Now it’s £1.24bn. The doom merchants of 40 years past look, frankly, fatuous.
Due caution arrives mandatory here, of course. The cinema industry isn’t the press business. Media apples, media pears. Nevertheless, there are surely a few broad lessons. Cinema managements, confronted by apparently inevitable collapse, didn’t stand on the front steps crying “Woe!”. They re-thought, rebuilt, innovated, refurbished. They started in-house cafes and clubs. They geared prices to the world around them (still £4.99 in Peckham). They followed the digital brick road with elan. And they settled shrewdly for a smaller but viable business model.
Where have you recently noticed that same approach yielding results via printed pages? Of course: in the book trade, which, much more recently, seemed on the brink of tablet oblivion, but found ways of stopping the rot. Bookshop browsing is a human experience, a way of connecting. Beautiful pictures printed on glossy paper have a trophy value. Book collections carry the reflected glow of ownership. Book world is surviving for the same reasons that movies remain the millennials’ night out of choice.
We’re not talking “transition” in areas like these any longer, not saying that TV or smartphones will replace movies, not arguing that turning book pages has become an outdated chore. The obvious truth is quite different. You can have a continuing cinema industry as well as television, phones, tablets, Netflix et al. You can have printed books and Kindles. Not one or the other: both. Which brings us right back to the Daily Mail et al, wobbling on that gale-force clifftop.
The dream, 10 years ago, was that newspapers could build a digital audience and then turn the presses off, able to carry on seamlessly across screens great and small, raising cash from ads and/or subscriptions. Transition QED. But such roseate visions, if they were ever real, have faded fast. It isn’t just ad-blocking, though that doesn’t help. It’s Facebook and Google hoovering up the ads – 85 cents of every digital ad dollar in the US – and becoming the dominant pathways of news distribution so that branded websites may come to seem almost irrelevant.
There’s “borderline panic” among web news startups, according to the New York Times – as Mashable and Vice cut back on numbers, BuzzFeed reduces its profits forecast and Salon goes belly up. What price the HuffPost now? How will all these new news sites justify their zillions in investment cash as digital ads bleed away?
But remember that national papers sell 6.7m copies every morning, and 6m plus on Sundays. That’s cover-price money every step of the way. Print ads still account for nearly two-thirds of Mail money flowing in. Remember that more than 35 million Brits continue to read a print paper, according to the latest National Readership Survey results. Remember that 95% of the population reads a paper or magazine on newsprint, mobile, tablet or laptop. But ask readers – as Reuters did the other day – whether they’ll pay money for quality, trusted news on the net, and 63% say “no thanks”.
This is transition stalled, maybe non-existent. This a world without big, simple answers – especially the faded faiths of five or 10 years back. From transition to desperation. A world where individual responses and particular audience targets are vital with or without screens. A world for resilience rather than woe. Print papers may not be the long-term answer, but they are part of the present answer. They need pricing sensibly: see how the Express group has made circulation strides there. They need innovation: the story of the i. They need constant creativity: observe how the suddenly struggling Mail has barely changed a note or a presentational ploy in 15 years.
If they’re a “bridge to the future”, as one Guardian digital wizard proclaims, then that bridge needs urgent attention. There’s plenty left to work with before, in movie terms, the titles roll for The End. In some ways print, properly nurtured, properly priced, gives papers time to change that the startups can’t match. But first the chorus of nemesis peddlers needs to stop wailing – and start thinking.
