Although 2016 sounded the death knell for the Independent’s print edition, it also witnessed the launch of weekly print newspaper, The New European – billed as a “pop-up paper” aimed at remain voters following the Brexit referendum. This year has also seen a growing audience for online magazines such as The Pool and The Lad Bible Group, which reaches more than 150 million people a month. In a time of such flux, we asked five industry experts what the future of publishing will look like:
Lorraine Candy, former editor-in-chief of Elle UK, incoming Sunday Times luxury content editorI think the demise of print is a myth. There is enough evidence to prove that there will be print, and it will continue to be in many forms and be available in many places.
It is an ever-changing world driven very hard by consumers and by companies that aggregate content like Facebook, but you have to adapt your business to fit a) where the money is and b) where your audience is.
All of these social media businesses are about telling a story and then building a business around it, and you have to be very collaborative. Those people at the top of their blogging game are knowledgeable and powerful and reach a new consumer. Why would I not work with them? Why would I not work with Instagram? It is a really brilliant place to put very beautiful images and we are in the business of beautiful images.
There will be a lot more brand extension in future. One of the things we were exploring at Elle was using our editors to work with brands before they create their advertising. [The future] will be about working in a much more collaborative, better and bespoke way.
Simon Fox, CEO, Trinity Mirror
I continue to hope there will be a role for print in 10 or maybe even 20 years, but the challenge is, will the generation that has not grown up with papers migrate to print? There is no reason to think they will embrace print and therefore it is incredibly important that we as publishers get the right digital proposition, both editorially and commercially, and that is what we are struggling with. Publishers have a very strategic decision to make, which is how much of their content to make available on social media platforms and how that is going to be monetised in the future.
Adblocking is a very serious issue and we and other publishers need to recognise that digital advertising can’t be our sole revenue stream. It is a very important one, but we need to develop other revenue streams from our enormous digital audience. E-commerce is one area. The Sun has gone heavily into betting, for example, which is also important for us, because about one quarter of our content is sports related. Ticketing is another huge area that clearly make sense, particularly locally. These are nascent revenue streams but ones which are growing pretty fast.
Bob Franklin, professor of journalism studies, Cardiff University
When you’re teaching journalism, you teach students how to write that opening paragraph that will attract the attention of search engines but you get these grotesque “filter bubbles” [where website algorithms guess what content users would like based on previous behaviour]. A search engine knows what sort of things attracts readers so you put the words in and you take people down an ever narrower editorial road. In the end, all they read is stuff which reinforces their views, but never challenges their integrity.
There is also a lot of stuff going on in drone journalism, or “dronalism”. You just fly these things up in the air and they take pictures, or you park it outside someone’s room to overhear a conversation. All this stuff is producing stories; it’s big data. One big problem is that when people go online they stop buying and reading the print product and, there are various ratios, but one is that you’ve got to get 100 online readers to match the [ad] revenue income from one print reader. It’s a real uphill battle and you can’t run with that sort of business model.
Lucie Greene, worldwide director of The Innovation Group, J Walter Thompson, which recently published their own ‘pop-up’ magazine, Glass
There’s a parting of the ways occurring in publishing. On the one hand, you have mass market print brands shrinking (US title Teen Vogue will reduce from nine issues a year to four next year), and focusing on digital content strategies. You have new players, like The Pool, and The Midult launching online first and having events to bring this to life, rather than spending on print.
Increasingly new information is also going audio – we’re seeing branded podcasts becoming the next avenue of branded content. Amazon Echo is allowing people to seek information and content, listen to entertainment and shop, audibly, and people interact with it verbally. We’re discussing things with Siri, rather than emailing. People are publishing podcasts over blogs.
The flipside is that we’re seeing a renaissance in print titles – particularly design and women’s titles which are intentionally luxurious, in beautiful high quality paper, and priced at a luxury price point. The Gentlewoman, Riposte and Cherry BombBombe are all examples of print titles that make print a luxury experience, something slow, not disposable, and considered. It’s a counterpoint and a step away from the bigger mass market titles which have focused on scale rather than price point.
Roy Greenslade, Guardian columnist and professor of journalism, City, University of London
“What we thought would be a transition from mainstream to digital, which was already a big disruption, is now being disrupted by “new” digital tools, such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram. Social media companies need to realise they do need us. And I think at the moment they don’t. They think they can use us and abuse us, but gradually they are killing the goose that lays the golden egg.
We ought to think about who set the agenda for the Brexit debate – undoubtedly the mainstream newspapers. If you look at the decline in print, in 10 years’ time they will not be in a position to do that. So what does concern me is, where will the forum be for a national conversation? Facebook? Facebook is an example of the “Daily Me”: you only want to read what you want to read, and Facebook feeds that back to you through algorithms and then you are not accessing new information, new ideas, new thoughts.
I still have faith in human beings. Algorithmic “dronist” journalism is frankly not the kind of journalism which will really provide enough intellectual insight to readers. Data journalism can be accomplished with algorithmic help, and drones can be very helpful, but in the end we need humans to analyse what they bring back.
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