Crikey yesterday had an interesting article by Christopher Warren: How much longer can the living dead tabloid newspaper survive — in print or digital?. Regulars here will know this is a question I have wondered about for years.
I think many Australian daily newspapers are losing money on more days of the week than they are making money. I know newsagents lose money from them due to the paltry 12.5% (or thereabouts) GP the publishers pay.
But back to the Crikey article.
A big moment broke in the history of journalism last week, when the ever-serious Financial Times asked with its usual tentativeness: “Can the traditional British tabloid survive the digital age?”
Spoiler alert: No, it can’t, and it’s not just in Britain; it looks like the format that made our media “mass” in the 20th century — the tabloid newspaper — is, finally, done.
It’s part of the bigger question about the continued struggle of daily newspapers in print, and even in digital. The “British” type of tabloids like Murdoch’s Sun or Rothermere’s Daily Mail — or News Corp’s Australian tabloid chain — have stumbled into a twilight, zombie world. They’re only part-alive. They’re still printing (some), yet culturally, politically, they’re wholly dead.
Locally, this past weekend saw another blow to the survival of print, with the report that Racing NSW was pulling its $1.5 million placement of form guides from The Sydney Morning Herald. Absolutely “a commercial decision on value received”, the AFR reported, and nothing to do with the paper’s reporting of a NSW auditor-general’s look at the organisation’s management of taxpayer-funded projects.
It’s a good article, well worth reading.
The “tabloid sensibility” remains alive through aggressive campaigns and provocative content. However, the business model is failing. High prices and AI-generated content have further alienated audiences.
You only have to look at what the publishers have done to understand their disinterest in the long term of newspapers.
They have ripped newspaper home delivery from newsagents, corporatised it and backed it with poor customer service. Subscribing is easy, cancelling is hard.
The products themselves are thin, loaded with content that is stale by the time it arrives in the shop to be sold. I just don’t get why someone pays money for old content and clearly biased content.
Smart newsagents have newspapers at the back of the shop, in a low cost location.