Smash the presses! Kill the journalists! commentary by Andy McCourt

The iPad is here…try to be be afraid, or at least be alert. The industry needs more lerts and fewer fraids, says Andy McCourt in his monthly column.

First, I think Apple is a great company and makes great products, including the new iPad. I admire Steve Jobs and his creative team. What is both surprising and annoying over the past week is the lemming-like stampede to the euthanasia clinic by people in the industry who should know better.

The printing industry is more than just newspapers of course, but papers make a handy bellwether for the broader Church of Print. With the exception of countries like India and China, newspapers around the world have taken a battering from the combined cyclonic forces of online news and the global financial crisis.

Australia’s newspaper industry has fared much better than its counterparts in the USA and Europe. In the last six months of 2009, US circulations dropped 10.6%. In the UK the figure was lower, at -3.1%. In Australia, Monday to Saturday national, metropolitan and regional circulations were down just -1.8% in the last reporting period available, Oct-Dec 2009. In fact, according to The Newspaper Works, looking at the past ten years, total Australian newspaper circulation has hardly changed, at -0.5% for the first decade of the third millennium.

I would put this outstanding performance down to three factors:
1) We have great newspaper content, journalists and editors.
2) We have an intelligent, educated population who like to read.
3) We have some of the most modern and efficient newspaper printing plants in the world with distribution to match.

So, it was with gob-smacking astonishment that I heard, on last night’s ABC Media Watch programme, the Editor-in-Chief of News Limited’s The Australian, Chris Mitchell, utter the immortal words:
“When you remove fixed costs from newspapers, they become much more viable. If you think about a newspaper without paper, ink, petrol and trucks, you remove 60-70% of the cost base.” Huh?

I am sure the crews at Chullora and Port Melbourne would be delighted to hear that, Mr Mitchell. Some analogies:
•    Airlines: “If you think about an airline without aircraft, seats, avgas and airports, you remove 99% of the cost base.” (Great, we’ll charge for showing videos of Phuket, Paris and Fiji instead)
•    Government: “If you think about a government without a parliament, ministries, politicians and branches, you remove 100% of the cost base.” (Hmmmm…no, sorry, I was dreaming)
•    Hospitals: “If you think about a hospital without beds, operating theaters, nurses….” (You get my drift?)

For crying out loud, newspapers are newspapers and by definition they need presses, ink and paper man! They also need good writers, journalists and photographers to provide the content. This is or course expensive and, as Media Watch’s eloquent Jonathon Holmes said, thousands of reporting jobs have vanished because traditional newspaper advertising returns can no longer support the news-gathering function. This aspect is indeed a vexed issue and galling to proprietors like Rupert Murdoch who sees his company’s output being ‘knocked off’ online for free, or accessed on newspaper’s own free-to-air websites. It’s time to pay for online content and iPad-versions, says Rupe.

Is the problem really so dire that you’re prepared to consider walking away from print and journalism, Mr Mitchell? Do that and The Australian will become a minor web/blogsite with little or no relevance in Australian society. Irrelevant, emasculated, third-rate and laughable. Not enough people will pay for something they can’t hold in their hands as a trusted, unchangeable record. Show me a successful purely internet-centric major news website that is not either 100% driven by or substantially draws from newspaper, TV news or other journalistically-created content. As French writer and educator Frederic Filloux said on the same programme, online advertising revenues are 16-20 times lower than print revenues.

The last available Audit Bureau of Circulation figure puts The Australian at 138,765 copies sold daily (more on Saturday). The adult (15 years +) population of Australia is approximately 18 million. That means just 0.77% of Australia’s adult population buy this title, plus the pass-on readership which may double or treble this number, but it is still read by no more than 2.2% of the adult population.

By comparison, other News Ltd titles in Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Tasmania and Northern Territory sell around 1.5 million combined copies per day, reaching around 8% of the adult population; 16-24% when total readership is calculated. Add the many regionals and the figure is higher. This does not include Fairfax, APN, WA News and independent titles which, if total newspaper purchases each day are combined, shows that our newspapers are bought by about 18% of the adult population and read by a respectable  36-54% when pass-on readership is considered.

By all means let’s see newspapers and magazines repurposed for the iPad, iPod and whatever other electronic devices are out there but let’s not jump off the newsprint cliff prematurely, if at all. By investing in innovation, great news coverage, investigative reporting, entertaining commentary, useful features and demographically-relevant content, newspapers can continue – in print – for a very very long time.

Oh, by the way, if you’d like to see a new iPad being smashed to pieces instead, try this link.

Just call me Ned Ludd!