When the New Day publication launched in February 2016 it did so under a fanfare, the first new national paper in the UK for years, 2010 to be exact, it cost 25p then upped to 50p.
Mainly aimed at a middle-aged female audience, it was politically neutral and intended to be digested in 30 minutes - hmmm doesn't that sound like the Metro?
We'll it was all very exciting, then after 10 weeks at the start of this month it ceased publishing, the experiment hadn't worked. But is that really a huge surprise?
When looking around the print media industry there is a very good and very well known reason why a new national hadn't been launched since 2010, CONSUMER BEHAVIOUR HAS CHANGED!
Publishers around the world are scrambling to work out how to charge for content that is readily available online and via social media channels now vs these traditional channels. This is no great shock and no secret. Circulations are in near-terminal decline, newstrade (store purchase) is especially hard hit as shelf space is at a premium and being squeezed. The solution, at least in the short term is around the subscription model. Publishers in the main are aiming to tie readers to a contract for a given period of time in exchange for a significant discount on the cover price, many publishers also throw the kitchen sink at subscribers in terms of gifts and incentives as added extras. Is this sustainable?
There is also the push to encourage digital reading with paywalls going up on websites to access the content. This may be considered against the ethos of the internet and sharing information, but when there are bills to pay and mouths to feed it is not unreasonable to expect a business to charge for its services.
The challenge remains that publishers are neither in the digital world or print world they are still occupying the middle ground. In my humble opinion, the big winner to save print media will come from the first publisher to fully embrace the digital world with a quality product (some questionable website experiences still exist), to fully believe in their goal and to gamble and go for it. Take off the training wheels and take a risk...that probably won't happen though as it's such a leap from the comfort of print and we'll continue to see years of scrabbling around for scraps of the market share combined with a decline in the quality of content produced.
What a cheery thought.
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