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NI’s media director explores the future of newspapers |
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Friday, 15 June 2007 |
Mark Chippendale, News International’s media director, was the guest speaker at an MPA lunch this week, at which he outlined his views on the future of newspapers.
 Chippendale Chippendale spoke candidly.
He told the audience that initial feedback internally at NI to his appointment, particularly from journalists, hadn’t been particularly positive, as his previous experience was all digital related rather than print. “I am” he said “a print immigrant.”
He also warned the primarily advertising folk present that they needed to think hard and fast about the future as traditional media spending was disappearing fast. He also conceded that although digital readership was expanding at a rate of knots, making money out of that readership was proving challenging for all the leading media players.
Some niches, such as Fantasy Football, were proving extremely profitable but overall the market was still searching for revenues that lagged some way behind ‘traditional’ spend.
The value of a title’s digital readers remains stubbornly well below the worth of a title’s print readers - approximately one seventh of the revenue value in monetising terms.
He quoted Rupert Murdoch describing himself as a ‘digital immigrant’ and added that kids today are ‘digital natives’. Their future reading patterns will unquestionably look quite different from ours he added. Whether you are comfortable with this or not, there’s no escape he maintained and the dilemma facing publishers is that they simply have to invest to stay in the game.
He pointed out that the former broadsheet titles were now attracting between 50 to 75% of their readers online whereas the tabloids were still read by an overwhelming majority in print format.
His view was that newspaper brands, strong brands, held the key. Particularly when brands commanded so much influence. The Times front page can still make or break governments while the Sun’s back page can still lead to a change of the England manager. The Sun brand, he said, was held in such trust and affection by its readers, that its potential earnings from non print activites were enormous.
In 1996, NI’s print titles had a reach of 20m adults. In 2006, albeit from a broader collection of titles, NI was now attracting 22 m adult readers. The trick was how to lever the brand to ensure both digital and print benefited from the larger and geographically wider readership.
He cited the Telegraph as a good illustration of how things can work well. The paper had the scoop of Michael Grade quitting to join ITV but the paper surprisingly - and against many people’s judgement and reflexes – decided not to hold back the story for print publication but broke it instead on www.telegraph.co.uk.
The result, however, was that News at Ten, Newsnight and other news organisations picked up on the story quoting the Telegraph as the source.
The next day sales of the print edition were up markedly without any promotional expenditure while web traffic also rose substantially.
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