If there’s one thing that has truly revolutionized the world in the last five hundred years, it is the printed word. Printing technology simply made it easy for the world to share knowledge and further the cause of human civilization. And overtime, journalism, a new form of ‘literature in a hurry’, developed into a profession, piggy banking on this invention. Then, sometime towards the end of the nineteenth century radio burst on the scenes, and it looked like news in print would soon be history, but contrary to all expectations and predictions, the print news media thrived.
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A few decades later television arrived and similar nay, even more dire predictions about the imminent demise of the print media were made; but it marched on. In the last decade, with the Internet becoming ubiquitous all over the developed world and across swathes of the developing world, the demise of the printed word stares us in the face, or so say the naysayers. Countering them are the spirited bunch of optimists who argue that the medium will survive this onslaught as well, and both sides have very convincing figures to boot. Now, since statistics are the last refuge of the devil, this piece will shy away from quoting too many figures to support either argument. Yet, what cannot and should not be discounted is the fact that across the developed West, the print media – newspapers and magazines -- are in a steady decline, and the economic recession has only added to their bag of woes.
One major reason for this decline is the ever-changing tastes and reading habits of the people in the developed world. With the Internet pervading almost all aspects of their daily existences, and their lives becoming ever more stressed, they are reading less and increasingly consuming their news in ways other than from their morning paper or the weekly magazine. Moreover, with the recession, the advertising revenues have plummeted as a result of which their print runs have taken a sizable hit; forcing many newspapers to downsize and lay people off. The latest figures of the Publisher Information Bureau of the United Stares indicate that till September 2009, magazines in the United States have seen a whopping 27 percent drop in the number of advertisement pages translating into a 20 percent drop in revenue. In Canada as well, the number of advertising pages dropped 21 percent, signaling the same trend.
Moreover, news resources such as The Huffington Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/) are using innovative models such as getting together loosely knit teams of a few hundred unpaid bloggers across the United States and few in other countries to write. In fact, The Huffington Post has a unique business model in which half the content is dished out gratis by their team of blogger reporters, in real time, whereas the remainder is aggregated from news resources across the world. And the site reportedly made upwards of US$ 3 million in revenues last year.
Why do people write for free for The Huffington Post? Well, if your piece is published, you’re read by millions of people online. To put it simply, it has become ‘prestigious’ to write for it now (Barack Obama wrote for them before the US went to vote last November), and that is the value proposition the site offers to each of its contributors. And in a little over three years since Ariana Huffington launched this venture, it has become the most visited blog on the Internet!
The fundamental point here is that in the developed world, there has, in the last few years, come about a tectonic shift in the way people consume news. No longer is the traditional media the sole provider of up-to-date information. Professionally managed blogs and aggregators that offer relevant video and audio inputs (live or recorded) on the same platform, are filling in an important void, and fast. And the traditional news media is fast having to play catch-up with most news media websites offering full content with relevant audio-visual inputs and user-generated content. Several blog publications in the US are now also available on e-book readers like the Kindle, which are the new ‘in thing’ when it comes to content delivery mechanisms. Recently five big magazine publishers in the US — Condé Nast, Meredith Corp., News Corp., Time Inc. and Hearst Corp — teamed up together to form a ‘digital storehouse’ so as to provide digital content to consumers across media like phones, e-book readers, laptops, etc.
The scene in India: should you be starting a new print publication?
In India, however, the story is quite different. The print media in English, Hindi and the regional languages is not just managing to sustain, but it is actually thriving. To be sure, during the height of the economic recession there were a few scares when advertising revenue had suddenly dried up and the cost of newsprint had shot up, and many a publications did tweak their revenue model or reduce their print runs in a bid to survive. Yet, as compared to the mainstream English media in the United States or the United Kingdom, the English print media in India has weathered the storm rather deftly (of course, an indirect government bailout in terms of full page advertisements just before the recently concluded general elections was more than just helpful, but that is another story).
One major reason why print readership in India has not been impacted is the low penetration of the Internet in the country. And this is visible more so in the case of the Hindi and the vernacular press, whose core readership hardly seems to access news from online sources. Besides, online news resources specific to India are more or less mere ‘extensions’ of their print editions with hardly any exclusive content available online. Moreover, no news resource in India has managed to generate a workable business model that can sustain its online venture on a standalone basis.
Yet, with the impending advent of 3G telephony within the next few months and with streaming content on the phone (over time at extremely low tariffs) set to become a reality, one can speculate and for a good reason that irrespective of the language, Indians would take to the digital medium as their preferred mode of news consumption and that the print media will face its biggest challenge (since the advent of 24-hour news channels) in the next three to five years.
Whether the print media will stand up to such a challenge is anybody’s guess. What cannot be discounted however is that anyone hoping to start a print venture will have to take the ever-changing technology and its impact into account. Before starting a publication in any market, there are a few pertinent questions that need to be asked and answered:
1. Is there a need-gap that such a publication would seek to fulfill?
Often, publications are launched without any apparent need for them. The market is flush with funds and businesses with money to deploy and jump onto the bandwagon hoping to grab a share of the pie. They do so often with very little understanding of the market or what the consumer desires. Such infirmities are sought to be glossed over with glitzy advertising campaigns and seemingly irresistible promotional offers. The biggest casualty is content, and more often than not, shoddy, misdirected and mistimed content sinks the publication. A new publication would most likely succeed if it can offer niche content. This is because chances are that the market is already saturated with good and mediocre generic and even some specialist publications and you can survive only if your publication can wade through the noise.
2. If there is a need-gap, can such a need-gap be bridged only by launching a print publication, or are their alternatives in the electronic or online space that can do the job better?
If you figure that you should rather be serving your customers by launching an online news resource, you would save yourself the hassle of setting up printing and distribution networks. Even if you think you must serve news in black ink on a paper, you would do well if you plan an integrated online presence with the flagship offline venture, while you are still at the drawing board so that you can figure out how much of your online content has to be subscription-based and how much is free.
3. Are there any existing publications that can tweak their content or delivery mechanism and match up to the content that the proposed publication has to offer?
From a purely commercial standpoint, this is perhaps the most important question, for often publications and media houses that have successfully been in existence and have tremendous financial muscle and well-oiled distribution networks, have a distinct first movers’ advantage and can not only sustain in the face of competition during the gestation period but can also tailor their products so as to take the new entrant on a turf that is still not quite his own! You would have to make sure that not only do you have the financial muscle and human resources to stand up to the competition, but also the ability to constantly alter your strategy as does your competitor, both in terms of the content you offer and the unique selling proposition that your publication sells itself on.
4. Can the proposed publication generate enough cutting edge content that can be cross-promoted?
In this age of multiplicity of media outlets and media convergence, it becomes pertinent that such content which can sustain itself across media streams and be unique enough to be sold across geographies, be produced. This does not mean that only generic content should be produced. Far from it, this is an age of specialization and only niche content can sustain long enough to have a respectable shelf life. Yet, such content has to be relevant to as wide a consumer base within the target readership as possible and has to be so progressive as to survive competition on its own merit.
The regulatory approvals that one needs before starting a print publication and the time it needs.
For a complete lowdown of rules and regulations on registering a publication, just visit the website of the Registrar of Newspapers for India (RNI) at: https://rni.nic.in/welcome.htm.
For detailed rules and regulations regarding FDI in the print media, please refer to the Manual of the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion, Government of India: http://dipp.nic.in/manual/manual_0403.pdf.
Speculation is rife that the government will soon raise the present FDI limit of 26 percent, to 49 percent.
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