THE FUTURE OF PRINT MEDIA IS THE PAST OF TV/RADIO:

Let Us Pay: John Lanchester on the future of the newspaper industry (John Lanchester, 12/16/10, London Review of Books)

The global flagship of serious journalism, the New York Times, lost $74.5 million in the quarter to March 2009, and accepted an injection of $250 million in cash from the Mexican telecoms billionaire Carlos Slim; it emerged that the paper was carrying $1.3 billion in accumulated debt. And it is one of the healthier US newspaper companies: the Tribune group, which owns the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, had already gone bankrupt. In the UK, Times Newspapers lost £87.7 million in the year to June 2009, having lost £50.2 million in the previous year. These figures are not, by industry standards, especially bad. It was mayhem out there.

In the last few months, however, the tone of the conversation in the business has changed. It’s now not so much ‘We’re doomed!’, more ‘Quick, what’s the plan?’ For one thing, advertising has recovered. This isn’t so much to do with classified ads: those are gone, for the simple and clear-cut reason that it is no longer rational to put those ads in newspapers rather than online. Other forms of advertising, however, have slightly recovered, and rates of decline have reversed. One of the panic-making things about 2009 was that online newspaper ads shrank; that was terrifying, because online ads, although less lucrative than their print counterparts, were supposed to be the future of the news business. In 2010, online advertising has recovered for most papers, in most cases by double-digit amounts. The journalism being produced by newspapers now has more readers than ever before; in some cases, many millions of readers more. They are reading it for free online, of course, but still: it’s hard to be depressed by the thought that your product has a huge new audience. The Guardian, for instance, increased its online readership by 62 per cent during the year to December 2009, with a lot of that growth abroad; it had 37 million readers in the course of the year, and more readers in the US than the Los Angeles Times. It also earned £25 million from digital advertising. In the case of the LRB, the internet has helped the print circulation climb to 55,000, and 7000 of those readers have joined in the last 12 months. For the LRB, the internet offers a new way of getting readers outside the traditional channels of direct mail. The trouble with direct mail is that it’s expensive, and its audience is confined to an existing ‘universe’ of potential customers from mailing lists. The internet expands that audience to anyone with access to a web browser; in addition, the paper’s content becomes its own form of advertising. Another factor may be the length of the LRB’s articles: if you’re reading this online, your eyes are probably bleeding by now. So online works as a form of marketing without cannibalising the print circulation too much. That’s what seems to be happening, anyway. Besides, in the UK, customers are still buying, on average, 15 million papers a day. That is not a small number. The whole business is not about to disappear overnight.

There have been some unexpected successes. The Evening Standard was bought by the former KGB agent Alexander Lebedev, and turned into a freesheet. This at the time seemed to me the craziest idea anyone in the business has ever had, turning a paying product into something that you just give away, and hoping that the increased (though free) circulation causes a sufficiently lucrative spike in advertising. It’s like jumping out of an airplane in the hope that you will land in a big enough pile of hay. But guess what? It worked. The Standard’s circulation is now at 700,000 copies, and it is – as you can tell just by looking at it from a distance – fuller of ads than ever. It seems bizarre to me that something I was willing to pay for is doing better now that it’s given away; also, despite the fact that the Standard is free I hardly ever read it because I don’t travel on the Tube at rush hour, so I rarely get to see a copy. But the rush hour thing is a central reason for the paper’s rebirth: as a Standard veteran explained to me, ‘there’s no mobile reception in the Tube – it’s as simple as that.’ For the first time in quite a while, it’s not all gloom.