While TV and the Internet are often accused of killing the newspaper culture, my contention is that the print medium is digging its own grave. It has yet to find much success. But at least it’s trying hard.
Recently, a friend of mine, who happens to be in-charge of marketing at a multinational in Karachi, decided to pick a fight with me. His basic argument was that newspapers are slowly dying their natural death. Being an old, outdated medium, it is bound to be replaced by inherently superior media like Internet and television. True to my procession, I politely pointed at the newspaper industry’s resilience since a good decade of private satellite TV boom has not yet made it fade into oblivion. But I did confess that it is becoming increasingly difficult to defend the newspaper industry.
After bit of a thought I realised that my beef was with my friend’s belief that newspapers were somehow by nature inferior to electronic media. For starters, let’s just get the newspaper versus the online debate out of the way. Newspapers are not at odds with Internet, period. Are standalone news websites (sites which are not off shoots of their parent newspaper or TV channel) capable of giving a tough time to websites of leading newspapers, either in terms of quality or quantity of content? Not in Pakistan at least. On the contrary, newspapers with their immense depth to gather news and generate analysis are in a great position of strength to expand their readership using inexpensive online editions. As for advertising bucks, online as a medium has yet to attract a decent share to justify any discussion.
Now coming to the real competitor – the idiot box. The argument generally given is that TV is inherently a far superior medium for news consumption than newspapers; it’s more current hence better suited for latest news (every latest news is, by the way, not breaking news, contrary to what our TV channels would have you believe) and it has video and voice, etc.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. A newspaper is not inferior by nature. Actually it is in some ways more suitable for news consumption. It lets you choose the news you want to consume at your own free time; it gives you enough opportunity to really grasp the news and analysis and revisit sentences that you might not have understood the first time.
Then why is newspaper circulation overall not increasing, rather dropping all over the world? My reply would be, well they are growing in India and Bangladesh; countries with more or less similar conditions to us. In fact, newspapers in India as a whole have been able to increase their share of the total ad-spend in the last decade and are growing at a faster rate than the TV industry. Surprised?
Well, when in rest of the world newspapers were increasing their subscription prices to try and cover for falling ad revenues caused by the global economic slow down, Indians decided to do otherwise. Unbelievably, Indian newspapers today cost pretty much the same as they did 15 years ago — despite inflation of over 400%. At under Rs5 (Pakistani), their quality English dailies cost just a bit more than the salvage price for old paper, making them effectively free.
The CEO of Times of India wrote this in one of his recent columns: “We came to a realisation as early as the mid-1990s that against the escalating onslaught from free news-media like television (Internet was yet to happen!), it was important to make the cover price of newspapers a virtual non-issue for readers. We had inherent faith that if we were able to build a large enough readership, advertising would pay for it. We were willing to jettison the stream of circulation revenue for the sake of maximising advertising revenue. And this bet has clearly paid off handsomely”.
However, in Pakistan, our print media barons continue to follow the same self-destructive path despite availability of a cheap distribution system absent in the west. A mistake is forgivable but repeated increase in cover prices every nine months to a year is just plain criminal. Worse, the industries representative association (APNS) has fixed a minimum-price-criteria, which doesn’t allow any newspaper to reduce its price, thwarting any chances of a much needed price war.
If ever an obituary of the newspaper industry of Pakistan is written, you’d know who the undertaker was.
The writer is Chief Operating Officer,
Pakistan Today.
