Newspapers are in freefall. Print editions are being discontinued. Editors are being replaced with alarming regularity. Financial losses are mounting. Digital strategies are yet to bear fruit. New readerships are fickle, promiscuous and hard to impress.
If that is true of British and US newspapers, then the situation is, if anything, worse in continental Europe. There many of the traditional media are considered to be several years behind in the digital revolution, still experimenting with paywalls, digital technologies and alternative means of storytelling. Bankruptcy stalks the sector, and staff layoffs are a weekly fact of life.
SPAIN
Spanish papers never enjoyed the big circulations seen in other European countries but sales are now in freefall. El Pais, which was selling 400,000 copies in 2007, slumped to 267,000 in April. Advertising income plummeted by 60 percent when the crisis hit and has yet to recover.
“In 2007 we could sell a full-page color ad for 30,000 euros [US$40,600 at current exchange rates]. Now we’re lucky if we can get 5,000 euros,” said Enric Sierra, head of Web content at the Barcelona-based La Vanguardia.
Its main rival, El Periodico, is up for sale.
“They’ll sell it to you for a euro if you’re prepared to take on their debt,” Sierra added.
There have been job cuts — 134 out of 160 at El Publico, 288 out of 456 at ABC, 129 at El Pais and 400 of the 1,464 employed on the three titles in the El Mundo group.
In November last year, El Mundo became the first major Spanish newspaper to establish a paywall modelled on that of the New York Times. It is claiming success, with 29,000 paying subscribers to its Orbyt features section. However, many of the deals are pitched at paper subscribers, who are a vanishing breed.
El Pais had similar plans until market research suggested a paywall would be suicide. Both titles are carrying large amounts of debt.
“Users are prepared to pay more if they receive more, as long as it’s quality content,” Pietro Scott Jovane, head of the Italian media group that owns El Mundo, said in a recent interview.
However, everyone agrees that the challenge in Spain is to get anyone to pay for any sort of content.
“There is almost no culture of paying for online content in Spain,” said Nacho Cardero, editor of the online paper El Confidencial.
“In spite of everything, the big brands — the Guardian, La Vanguardia, Le Monde — continue to be the points of reference for news on the Internet,” Sierra said. “Young people don’t buy newspapers, but when they look for news online the majority go to traditional papers because, perhaps unconsciously, they trust them.”
“You need at least three sources of income: subscriptions, advertising and the extra things you offer your readers through e-commerce, events and so forth,” said Ismael Nafria, head of digital innovation at La Vanguardia.
“News has no value anymore,” Nafria added. “Everyone already knows what’s in the news. It’s not impossible that people will pay, but they won’t pay for something that’s not worth it. The only thing that sells is quality.”
FRANCE
The Nice-Matin group is threatened with bankruptcy; the leftwing daily Liberation needs an urgent injection of 14 million euros; and Le Monde is seeking a new editor after staff complained about a lack of consultation over streamlining plans.
The French press is in crisis over the transition to a digital world. According to Henri Pigeat, the former boss of Agence France-Presse who now heads the Centre de Formation des Journalistes, a journalism school in Paris, France was inevitably going to be hit by the wave of change affecting the industry globally.
However, he said French newspapers were poorly prepared.
While arcane union practices were abandoned in the UK in the 1980s, “that didn’t happen here. French papers are still affected by corporatism. It means that they are trying to deal with those problems while moving online, at a time when there’s no money around,” he said.
Continued state subsidies for the press in France, totaling 408 million euros in tax breaks and reduced charges for this year, had hindered the industry’s development, he said.
“The state aid provided a sense of false security which prevented the press from reforming itself,” Pigeat said.
Alice Antheaume, a digital expert who is deputy head of the journalism school at the prestigious Sciences Po, sees two main challenges: persuading journalists to work for both Web and print, and monetizing content, whether it be via a paywall or advertising that is stubbornly refusing to migrate online.
France, she said, had a particular problem because the language barrier for many overseas readers limited revenue from paywalls: “We don’t have a global reach.”
There are some bright spots in the gloom. In the midst of the economic crisis, L’Opinion was launched a year ago as a niche daily paper and a Web site behind a paywall.
Luc de Barochez, the chief editor of the online version, said it was on target to break even in two years’ time.
The paper’s owner, Nicolas Beytout, still believes in print, and De Barochez said L’Opinion “chose the right model.”
“The fact is that our target readers, who are decision-makers, still read print, in their offices or on planes,” he said.
Other relative newcomers went directly online without a print support, including Mediapart, Rue89, Atlantico and Slate.
“That resolves the problem that traditional media have faced when they move to a paywall after allowing free consultation of their Web site. People want to know: why should I pay for something that was free before,” Pigeat said.
Although all newspapers have been affected by declining print sales, much of the regional press is still in rude health.
GERMANY
German papers have been sheltered somewhat from the global storm because of the comparatively late arrival of pay TV, traditionally high retail prices and the prevalence of the subscription model — accounting for three-quarters of Suddeutsche Zeitung’s sales, for example.
The weekly news magazine Der Spiegel is a case in point: the Hamburg-based institution was one of the first media companies to launch a news Web site, Spiegel Online, in 1994. The company made a point of running the Web site and the print magazine from different buildings, with two almost entirely separate editorial teams — a strategy that seemed to work.
“Spon,” as it is affectionately known, was for 15 years the country’s most popular Web site, while Spiegel sold more than a million copies.
However, while Spiegel Online remains a success this year, it has slipped to third place in the rankings and the magazine’s circulation has been stuck at less than 900,000 copies for more than four years.
In December last year, the Web site slashed its English-language output, just as the magazine’s NSA exclusive was finding new readers in the UK and US. In January next year, the magazine plans to change its publication forward a day to Saturday to stay on top of the news agenda in a faster-moving digital climate.
Other newspapers which have tried to ring-fence their profit making print operation are now struggling with declining ad sales revenue. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung announced on May 20 that it had suffered losses to the tune of several million euros.
“All the big German newspapers and news magazines are now increasingly trying to have one editorial team overlook all of its channels of output — it’s better for the overall brand,” said Roland Pimpl, a correspondent for the trade magazine Horizont. “It’s a sensible development not least because it means the whole editorial team ends up pulling on the same string.”
Other publications have tried to tackle the transition from print to digital with more radical experiments. The center-right daily Die Welt switched around editorial budgets in December last year, so that most of the commissioning is now done by online editors. The print edition is compiled by a team of only 12 people, including designers and picture editors.
Welt’s Web content hides behind a “leaky paywall” similar to the one used by the New York Times and the UK’s Daily Telegraph, which allows users to view 20 articles on the same browser for free every month — Suddeutsche has hinted recently that it will introduce a similar model for paid content in the winter.
Bild’s Web site, by contrast, tries to lure readers toward an online subscription by putting specific articles — such as exclusive interviews — behind a paywall.
One new German venture proposes a new take on the paywall debate altogether: 25 investigative journalists are trying to raise funds for “Krautreporter,” a non-advertising project inspired by Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish and De Correspondent in the Netherlands. For 5 euros a month, subscribers would get benefits such as commenting privileges or invitations to exclusive readings, workshops or panel discussions with the authors. However, most of the content would be free.
Stefan Niggemeier, a former Spiegel staffer who now runs his own media blog and is one of the more prominent faces behind Krautreporter, said it was important to experiment with journalistic forms beyond the old advertising-based model.
“Advertising ties you to a quick turnaround cycle and boosts the tabloidization of respectable newspapers’ online presence: If you don’t follow the herd, you lose clicks,” he said.
“We want to see if there’s a way of establishing a non-advertising-based model,” he said.
“Whether it will work, I don’t know, but I know it’s right to try it, even if it fails. When someone manages to chance upon something new, I want to be part of it,” he said.
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