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Last year I did a blog post covering the general decline in circulation and readership for Australian newspapers.
The Press Council’s 2007 report shows a slightly healthier situation, with a handful of papers actually showing growth from 2001 – 2007. I’ve posted the main graph of Metro papers here (you might need to grab the actual image to read the details). To make it easy, I’ve coloured the papers with declining readership in yellow and the ones maintaining steady in grey.
However – when you read their report in depth, you notice that there has been some creative accounting with these figures in a desperate attempt to forestall the knowledge that their industry is closer to death than General Suharto (what? he died today? well…. let’s say Castro.)
The report sez:
A significant development has been the unprecedented initiative taken by newspaper proprietors, acting collectively, to establish a new organisation, The Newspaper Works, to reaffirm to advertisers in particular that newspapers offer them a better and more influential platform than other media and, complementarily, to improve total newspaper circulation and readership. The new organisation has also undertaken, in conjunction with polling organisations, to try to improve the techniques used to measure circulation and readership of print editions and to measure newspaper website traffic accurately.
(Italics mine).
So – they are factoring in their online readership. Fair enough. Here’s the secret though – as I’ve argued here before – the transition from paper to online is VERY BAD for the print news business. Why? Isn’t a reader a reader? It’s the economics, stupid. When you buy The Age, how much do you pay for the privilege? A dollar fifty? I’m not sure, i don’t buy it (unless I’m in it). When you read The Age online, how much do you pay? Nada. So – they are automatically making less money. What about advertising? Well – let’s say you’re an advertiser. If you want to advertise in a newspaper that people in Melbourne read, how many options do you have? A handful? If, however, you want to advertise on websites Melburnians read, how many options do you have? Bazillions. And that number is just getting bigger every year. So it’s simple supply and demand economics. You don’t make as much money from an online reader as you do from a print reader.
Okay, so revenues must be in decline. What happens next? Do they hire MORE journalists? No. As everybody knows, they hire less journalists. And so the quality of their content goes down. Does that make readership go up? I don’t think so. And so the cycle of rot sets in. Print news organisations have a very expensive operation on their hands. When revenues go down, when people get down-sized on a regular basis, morale drops and… hey I’ve seen it happen in a million IT companies. It’s what happens when you think you’re invulnerable to generational change driven by technology and you think your brand has some kind of magical power which will continue forever. Basically – you’re sucking on your own exhaust pipe.
We’ve had an opportunity to witness this last week with the announcement that ACP is closing down The Bulletin, a magazine I was fortunate to appear in a couple of times – when Josh Gliddon did the first MSM coverage of TPN back in Feb 2005 and again in October 2006. The Bulletin’s circulation had been down and it just didn’t make sense to keep it open, according to ACP management. And we all know how disinterested Packer 3.0 seems to be in the media business.
What did the ACP execs have to say?
The Bulletin is Australia’s longest running magazine and was launched in 1880.
In the latest Audit Bureau of Circulations figures, The Bulletin had 57,039 in sales (Sept 07), which is down from circulation highs of over 100,000 in the mid 1990s. This trend is consistent with that experienced by many leading weekly news and current affairs magazines globally and is somewhat symptomatic of the impact of the internet on this particular genre.
It’s the beginning of the end.
Join Techcrunch’s Duncan Riley, Norg Media’s Bronwen Clune, World Communities’ Laurel Papworth, Tangler’s Mick Liubinskas and The Podcast Network’s Cameron Reilly for a chat about
This show was recorded with a live audience via Ustream and with live audience participation via Tangler.
2007 was a big year for TPN in lots of ways. We grew; we stumbled; we struggled; we survived. Bootstrapping a start-up isn’t glamorous. Trying to keep a fast-growing business alive when revenues are still small and you are funding it organically can be frustrating. Every day brings new challenges. Things you survive by telling yourself “one day it won’t be like this”.
We started off the year with a re-design of the homepage and lots of fast growth. Around the middle of year our server admin quit and I had to put a stop to adding new shows. Then a couple of months later our webdev quit. For the last couple of months we’ve been getting by with favours from friends whenever we need IT support. So it’s been frustrating on lots of levels. In March I thought we would finish the year with a million listeners a month. We missed that goal. Since March we’ve been hovering between 450,000 – 500,000 listeners a month. Now – when I compare that to some of the radio stations in Melbourne or Sydney, I feel pretty good. TPN, currently, one full-time employee. Me. No funding. No sales team. No IT team. Just me and a team of excellent, dedicated and PATIENT podcast producers who have tolerated our bumps over the last couple of years. I want to thank them all for their sense of humour when things go awry (like they did again over the last couple of days when out FTP server flaked on us) and their continued support for the TPN vision.
However, despite the struggles, it was a pretty good year. As you can see from the numbers below, we served nearly 5.5 million listeners during the year (okay, that number is slightly bullshit – it’s our monthly unique visitor numbers added together – but it sounds good so I’m sticking with it), who listened to nearly 7 million TPN podcasts (that number is legit). That’s a HUGE number, especially when you consider that since we launched in early 2005 we’ve only delivered a little over 11 million podcasts. Thinking about that 7 million number for a second – if we assume that each podcast is an average of 30 minutes long, that means you listened to us for 3.5 million hours (145, 833 days or 400 years non-stop) in 2007. No wonder your brain is hurting.
Of course I also want to thank our listeners and supporters. Those of you who listen to our shows, interact with us on the blogs, in Facebook, at MODM, Twitter, Second Life, etc. Without you we really would be what the cynics in the mainstream media think we are – people sitting in our undies, talking to ourselves.
Today I chat with Bronwen Clune, Founder and CEO of Norg Media, an independent Australian media company that allows anyone to contribute to the news as a Cit J (citizen journalist).
We talk about her vision for Norg (which stands for “news organisation”), how the media landscape is changing, and about being a female entrepreneur (my first ever female entrepreneur guest in 3 years??? WTF?).
It’s great to finally have Australia’s other online media entrepreneur on the show.
Bronwen is very popular on Twitter and you can follow her by clicking the photo below:
Thanks to @m0nty, @jodiem and @glemak for their questions submitted via Twitter during the show. Sorry to everyone else, you were too slow. 🙂
The track on today’s show is:
Burial
“Ghost Hardware” (mp3)
from “Untrue”
(Hyperdub)
Buy at iTunes Music Store
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More On This Album
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