Newspapers: The struggle to reinvent goes on

By the editors of Media Life

This article is part of a Media Life series “Reinventing the American Newspaper.” Click here to read other stories in the series.

Contrary to popular perception, newspapers were headed for trouble long before your grandfather began reading his daily news on an iPad.

Now they are in big trouble, and the question going into 2016 is when will they come upon a strategy for survival and rebirth?

Newspapers are not going away. They are a bedrock medium, and the constituencies they serve are wide-ranging: Large businesses, small businesses, community leaders, homeowners, parents, charitable groups, politicians, public servants—virtually anyone with a stake in their community.

Readers will still want to see pictures of their kids in the paper. They’ll still want to read about the most recent school board meeting. They’ll still buy copies to preserve for posterity.

The issue is what newspapers will become.

In 2007, newspapers were a $50 billion industry. Now they’re a $20 billon industry.

Revenues will stabilize at some point, but where? $15 billion? $10 billion? Might they climb back to, say, $22 billion?

Circulation has fallen from 125 million in 1990 to 92 million in 2014. Where will it settle out?

Ad spending will fall once again this year, in the range of 7 percent, predicts Media Life, based on conversations with and input from media buyers and analysts. Print circulation will similarly decline, with a bit offset by digital gains.

Most troubling for the newspaper industry is that so far nothing has worked to stem the losses.

The first strategy, really more of a panic reaction when revenues first tumbled, was to slash budgets. Thousands of jobs were cut.  That was not going to work, as so many newspaper analysts warned, and it didn’t.

Paywalls, where readers are charged to read stories online, also turned out not to be the answer. They worked for the big papers like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, but not for mid-market dailies and smaller papers.

The so-called internet-first strategy—building out a paper’s web presence- shows no real signs of working either, certainly not so far.

The reality is that the salvation of newspapers will not come in the form of one quick fix or solution. There are no silver bullets anymore.

It will come through a number of changes in how the business is done, large and small. It’s going to take rethinking how newspapers serve their advertisers and readers in what is a very different local media marketplace.

But it will be done, and one would hope we’ll begin seeing the first signs of that in 2016.

One could easily imagine a $15 billion newspaper industry that, while considerable smaller than it once was, is robust and vital and fiercely competitive.

Through this year, Media Life will be running a series of stories on papers across America that are leading the reinvention of the American newspaper. We’ll explore their strategies and the thinking behind them.

We’ll be asking media buyers and industry analysts and others for their best ideas, and we’ll publish them with the goal of stirring up discussion and debate.

If you’d like to contribute your ideas, feel free to send them our way via the comment box below.

Tags: forecast newspapers, forecasts, newspaper ad spending, newspaper forecast, newspapers, reinventing the american newspaper