Margaret Simons wrote an excellent piece yesterday for Crikey about Fairfax plans for a digital rather than print future. This paragraph will make newsagents sit up and take notice:
I gather that Fairfax Media is contemplating a fundamental shift away from a future based on print, and towards the migration of readers to online and in particular mobile devices — the iPad and its competitors.
Fairfax needs to do this, more do that News given the difference in customers of both organisations for their dailies.
I urge newsagents to read all of Margaret’s article and to consider this in the context of the newsagency of today, tomorrow and the future.
Consider the Australian Financial Review. If I was working for Fairfax I’d be crunching numbers about a digital only model with a subscription offer which includes a free tablet computer for a two year commitment. I have no doubt they could beat the 80,000 or so current daily sales for a much lower distribution cost.
This is not bad news, or speculation if that’s how you see the discussion of disruption to print. No, the changes are an opportunity for newsagents to reinvent themselves, to move on from the constraints of being an agent and to unshackle ourselves from the news. Many smart newsagents are doing this already and are having a ball.
i didn’t see one positinve reply to her artical . i still have to be convinced about the ipad . i had an elderly cutomer come in the other day and asked me about the ipad ,i told her what i new about it (which is very little) and she laughed and said how stuppid is that i will never give up reading a paper in the morning i have been doing so for the last 40 years . Has anyone botherd to ask the question to there customers on wether they would go online to read the paper , i think you would find that most every day people would not go online to read the paper or read a book.
Shaun, imagine you were running a blacksmith shop a hundred years ago and a customer came in asking you about these new fangled motor car thingummies.
You tell her what you know about them, which is very little, and she laughs and says “how stupid is that, I will never give up my horse and carriage that has served me well for 40 years”……
Paul, I could not have put it better. The future is upon us and we need to grasp the change and move with the times. The publishers are moving on without us and moving with the times. We need to clearly recognise this and focus on the opportunities around us and stop whinging to the publishers how tough it is and what we want them to do to fix our situation. They reaaly don’t care about us. They have enough on their plate trying to maintain their own profitability
Shaun please,
You cannot be serious!
The little old Lady is not the TARGET MARKET !
Newsagents will thrive as General Funky Retailers. With lots of Convenience Offerings. Think 7 elen with a newsagents twist?
Cheers
Chris
Game over. Digital will be the new platform now that advertisers can see how it works for them. It would be wrong to look only at the iPad in forming a view.
These are days of wonderful opportunities.
Come on you all really think one day you are going to wake up waiting for the paper and it will not show up what a load of BS yeah sure it will happen , i am not saying it won’t but the way you are all carring on is that it is happening tomorrow and we must prepare for the end of the world as we know it ,gees do you not think you will addapt to it over a time period . If your stores solely rely on magazines and papers you are in trouble now don’t worry about when you may loose papers and mags . I have been addapting my newsagency from the day i purchased it 3 and a half years ago .The main part of my business is now the copy shop ,the traffic flow from the papers and mags have helped me build up this department .
Chris the little old lady is all i have in my town and the little old lady is in a lot of towns
Paul and Chris just ask your customers if they would prefer to read the paper or a piece of plastic .If you are looking at selling something else to replace the papers give cd’s a go yep they still make them even though the ipod has been out for years
Shaun, you shouldn’t be asking your customers you should be asking the people who are no longer your customers.
most people buy papers not for the news.
i can just picture 4 old punters sitting out front of the tab with an ipad ,oh not sure how they will fold it up in there back pocket but . theres an idea someone should come up with an idea to accomodate that we will call it a paper just like the good ol days
Shaun, if you’ve seen the tv ads you will see only the freaks go to the TAB now. Most people bet online or by phone.
Shaun I am not sure how old your little old lady is but I am 64 and I haven’t read a hard copy of a newspaper for about 14 years, reading online for all of that time. I now like that The SMH is the easiest to read online from my iPhone, the print size just being the right size. For the sake of privacy I am not going to tell you where i read the news from my iphone, only to say it is a lot easier than the actual newspaper and the wife doesn’t say “Gawd you are not taking the newspaper with you are you?” So us old farts do take up on new technology. BTW I am an ex newsagent of almost 30 years standing
Shaun I know the point that your are making and totally agree.
Greg
Graeme,
Mind you don’t drop your version of the SMH on the tile floor!!!
14 years without reading a paper that is amazing . Your family couldn’t even have put a big congrats add in the local paper for you when you turned 60 because you would not have read it, now that would not have shown up on any iphone . Do your grandkids play any sport ?? well you wouldn’t know how they went in the local paper because you don’t read paper . and i suppose you have no idea what is going on in your local community because that willl not show up in your iphone either .
there is a lot more to news than just world news there is community news local sporting news birthdays , funerals etc
I accept the fact that the papers like the AUS ,fin rev etc will go with the ipad but local papers will be around for a long time yet
Peter,
You should have a look at the TAB Iphone/Ipad app. It is amazing. A full form guide and it has the ability to bet on any race or sport that the TAB is running a market on. Sure it may not impact you sales to the older punter, but you will not be increasing sales to the younger tech savvy people and I think that is the point. The market for newspapers and mags is declining.
I don’t punt but every sat afternoon I catch up with my mates at the local pub and have a laugh. The TAB area is the most populated area in the entire place and I can tell you I love it because every sat morning I sell the hotel 30 copies of the tele and 30 copies of the local paper so they can give it away to punters. The place is full of young people who like me are there to unwind from the week, and no one is sitting around looking at phones looking up races.
It is an entirely different market to the stay at home punters, it is more of a social thing and they all want a copy of the form guide even though it is on all the teles.
The average age would be about 30. These are the next generation of readers that need to be kept by us.
Shaun, a lot if not all of what you mentioned about local news can be read from their website on an iphone the same as The SMH.
The point I was light heartily trying to make that in my opinion THe SMH website seems to be tailor made for browsing on the iPhone. Also whilst I do gather must of my news from the web I have read the odd paper in those 14 years, what I am saying is don’t writet off the older generation to technology advancements.
Only time will tell. Dinosaurs found out too late. We ought to plan to not be like the dinosaurs.
Dinosaurs were wiped out by climate change eg a metorite or somthing cooled the world. Man could not compete with them they were the best maneaters evermade.
Tablet computers like the iPad.
dinasaurs wipeout happend in one hit so the old dinasaur had no chance to addapt . where as the newspaper situation is over a period of say 10 -20 year depending which blog you read some even say 18 months . Hence we will addapt with out even noticing it . Just my view as i cannot see the future just like everyone else it is guess work .
I think one read of page one of the Herald Sun today says it all……..”IPAD subscription, less than $8.00 per month”! Being launched next week.
Wake up people!
how many customers do you think you will loose next week ?
ok the ones reading it online at the moment will probally go to ipad those that have not started rreading online do you really think they are going out monday morning to buy there ipad ..
The reason i am so negitive toward this damm ipad is because i see all this info on here as great as it is hurting us more at present time than the actual ipad itself . This blog would have to be the best form of advertising for the ipad going .
If i was buying a newsagency today i would love to stumble upon this blog . I know we carry on about a whole lot of other issues eg supply etc but these can all be fixed and i believe they will in the near future .
It will initially be a lot that jump on board (as Shaun says, the ones that are already getting their news online will form a great majority of this – and a great proportion of these are gadget people who must have the latest tech gear) & the rest will be gradual with the generation change.
Seriously, if your business depends on Newspapers/Mags to survive (rather than get them through the door) you are already fodder in waiting.
Just my view from where we are.
Sorry you see it that way Shaun. You overestimate the reach of this blog. My goal in writing it every day is to encourage, push and guide newsagents to a bright future. Achieving this requires a realistic view of how technology will impact our channel.
There is no risk in driving a flexible forward thinking business model. On the other hand, there is a huge risk in thinking that our core products will be as important for many years as they are today.
Shaun s,
No one saying that print sales are going to go into free fall next week. Timing is the question and that all depends kn two factors – how quickly the publishers adapt to and push the new medium and how quickly the medium moves from the early adopter to the mainstream stage of its lifecycle.
The rise of the portable MP3 players was swift and it took the music industry significantly longer to adapt than it is taking news publishers to adapt to tablet devices.
The e-book industry has boomed in the last 24-12 months with Amazon reporting selling e-books at almost twice the rate they are selling hardbacks. Devices are dropping in price with the Kindle begin available for as low as $189.
As that price continues to drop (id picture an entry level price point around the entry level of a mobile phone) and publishers, in all likeliness, begin to bundle subscriptions with tablet hardware (much the same way mobile phones are bundled with plans), or at the very least make a conscious move to make digital content their mainstream offering, the shift to digital will move into the mainstream relatively quickly.
As happened with music.
i understand that Mark .Mark i know of a newsagent that is selling up solely because of the ipad ,this worries me as a threat it is ,but not tomorrow . As i have said in the past this blog is the best thing going as far as information on newsagents are concerned so please don’t think i am knocking you when i am commenting about the ipad .
What Max said in #24 sums up what i feel (i just blab on to much and probally say it the wrong way )
Anyway bring on the Ipad or such device i love a challenge it keeps me on my toes which makes my business better at the end of the day .
What I find interesting in this conversation is that somebody mentioned newsagency ‘core product’ in light of publishers embracing technology for their own survival.
Yet the publishers have demonstrated such a gross unwillingness in recent years to get with the times in relation to fair business structures and relationships with what was once their core customer base (newsagents). It’s still beyond my comprehension that, in this day and age, they’ve been allowed to get away with controlling private businesses the way they have, while every other conceivable aspect of small business has changed significantly.
And all the while, they’ve been working behind the scenes for quite a while now, orchestrating the slowest hot potato drop in history, whilst still demanding we, their former core customer base, tow their archaic line.
It just beggars belief. Thank god papers aren’t our core business!
publishers have a different business plan to mine i plan to make some cash and they plan to increase circulation at any price
I think Max has hit the nail on the head, if you rely on papers/mags to make your living then get ready to change jobs. If you do not as a lot of newsagents are doing now then not a lot will change we will continue to source new revenue streams. 80% of my newspaper sales are single item sales, sure a few people by gum or cigs as well but if I lost all of them tomorrow nothing would change as far as my bottom line.
I know what all the traditionalist are going to say, that I should not call myself a newsagent and should get out of the industry but to them I say that over the 20odd yrs I have fed my family from my shop I have seen a great deal of change. A lot of those changes were supposed to kill us off ie deregulation, lotto into 7/11 anti smoking laws etc but if you adapt you will survive.
To continue the dinosaur analogy, those that died could not adapt but those that adapted to the new environment continue to this day.
I say let the traditionalists die off. At some point the newsagency industry is going to go through a serious consolidation and we will inevitably end up with far fewer stores. There are areas already overpopulated with newsagencies and as print declines those who have not adapted (ie the traditionalists) will be the first to close their doors. Its good news for those of us that have adapted, because we get to pick up some, if not most, of their market share.
I was a traditionalist of twenty years standing until I found this blog three years ago. For a while I resisted what Mark was saying about changes coming and then I saw it for myself. I still have the same magazine space but have made significant changes, introducing new product categories – ink and gifts for a start. I have sold off my territory and have plans for more changes next year. I am planning to cut magazines by 250 titles back to 1,000.
There is still a place for traditionalists particularly out in country areas.
I know of 1 Newsagency in my Town who has just shut down, they were not traditionalist it came down of how they ran this particular Newsagency.
I enjoyed reading Shauns view, their can be more than 1 view on thing blog I am sure. Implementing change will happen, however elitist comments like Mr Moore’s will just turn people off the Marketing Groups.
Derek,
Call my comment what you like. Its how markets, especially retail markets, work. Business either adapts or dies. Newsagents were long protected from natural market forces and subsequently were not forced to adapt. That is obviously no longer the case.
While I will agree that regional and rural newsagents are slightly more resilient to the trend away from print, that is no reason not to keep ahead of the game and adapt now rather than later. Certain market trends may be delayed in these areas but they will eventually reach them.
Were a regional newsagent and adapting has improved our bottom line significantly.
My comment wasn’t really related to marketing groups. However, any marketing group that preaches adaptation and change usually makes their position pretty clear – they are not a group suited to traditionalist newsagents.