Author: Mark Fletcher

Richard Webb, former managing director of Trinity Mirror’s UK nationals division, writes at The Guardian about newspapers in the UK in the face of another decline in newspaper circulation:

It is said that that cockroaches can survive a nuclear holocaust. While newspapers are facing the worst financial crisis in living memory, they too, are survivors and I wouldn’t be surprised if many find ways to survive this trial.

Yes, their circulation revenues are under the cosh from declining sales and now advertising is suffering too. As profits plummet, the outlook is not good. Logic suggests we will soon be seeing multiple closures.

Wirting at Fox News, Dan Gainor, Vice President Business & Media Institute weighs in on the future of newspapers:

Once newspapers were the answer to the riddle: “What is black and white and read all over?” They’re no longer just black and white, but they are red all over. Red ink spills off nearly every page onto balance sheets across America.

The newspaper business is bleeding to death.

For another perspective, read what Walter Isaacson, former managing editor of TIME and president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, has to say in the current issue of TIME under the headline of How to save your newspaper.

Newspapers are in trouble around the world, as further evidenced yesterday with the latest earnings results from News Corporation.  No amount of effort from newsagents can address the national or global trend.  What we can an must do is manage our financial, real-estate and labour investment appropriately in the loght of these challenges.  While we risk speeding to an outcome, it is time newsagents put their businesees first in the face of such a considerable and obvious shift in how people are accessing news and information.

Imagining A City Without Its Daily Newspaper by David Folkenflik and published at npr.org invites us imagine what such a city would be like.  Folkenflik documents cities around the USA where the local newspaper is in trouble and contemplates how the void left by the closure of a newspaper may be filled.

A question newsagents could ask is what would a newsagency look like without newspapers?  I am not advocating this, just asking the question.

Newspapers have strict in-store location rules for many newsagents, they have expensive to manage add-ons and giveaways which are made more challenging by often (but not always) poor execution and they have a cover price (and therefore retailer margin) which has fallen considerably in real terms over the last ten years – a paper which was $1.00 in 1998 is $1.10 today.  That 10% increase in cover price is eaten by a 71% increase in rent, a 56% increase in wages and a 30% in other operating costs over the same period – real numbers in one of my newsagencies which I have owned since 1996.

The one benefit of newspapers for a newsagency is traffic.  This is falling as the newsagency channel experiences leakage to supermarkets and petrol and convenience outlets and because of newspaper sales falls overall.

So the question is worth contemplating.  What would your newsagency look like without newspapers?  It may be that through contemplating this question you can see opportunities worth pursuing.

Publishers could contemplate – what would your newspaper look like without newsagents?  Not that flash I’d suspect.  This is why it surprises me that publishers continue to starve newsagents of fair return on effort.