This post is by guest blogger Vidushi Kapoor, the newest addition to the Process Nine family.
Having spent some time reading about the speed and
velocity of the newspaper industry, I sat and wondered what ‘the future of
newspapers’ could look like. Since I am (thankfully) not in a news organization right
now, the immediate fears of losing revenue (and my job) are not haunting me,
which gives me the privilege to skip the immediate fire fighting and let my
imagination run wild!
Let’s look at our Demand/ Supply scenarios:
Demand:
It can be safely said that in the next 10-15 years, almost everyone who can and
wants to read, should be able to view news online – i.e. they should be able to
survive without a news‘paper’.
Supply:
Every newspaper is going digital, not because it’s a cool thing to do, but
because it’s the only thing to do if they want to survive. Hence, I don’t think
I’ll be way off the mark if I say that the next 15 years will see every
newspaper that survives having some digital presence.
Where will these curves meet? What would be the equilibrium?
Here’s my take. It has many assumptions that may never hold
true, but then again, this post isn’t going for the next Nobel!
Historically, the reason we had so many newspapers is:
Geographical Barriers
- I can’t have a newspaper flown from Japan and
Canada for me everyday unless I have an unlimited supply of money (which most
people don’t)
- Even if I can manage to source newspapers from
across the world (say, by having excellent contacts at the international
airport), I will not be as interested to read about a city where I have never
gone and may never go; or about affairs that don’t directly affect me. There
would also be the language issue.
Content & Presentation
Whether it’s a journalist who provides facts for what they are, without
his opinion, or for columnists who give out radical opinions, or simply for the
jokes and cartoon strips, newspapers create ‘product differentiation’ through
content and presentation when competing directly in a geographical location.
This is the biggest focus of organizations today when developing websites
and apps - content, images, presentation and UX.
Language
One
publication house in India can publish upto six newspapers, with more or less the
same content, but in a different language. Nuff said.
If we come back to our assumptions of the ‘future’, the pillar
of geographical barriers would fall. One could easily access news from any part
of the world and opine on it. If Twitter is abuzz with the latest comment from
Madonna, I should as well participate and ‘be included’ – it really costs
nothing!
(I will, at this point, make a quick assumption that “the
pay wall will fall” – which many today will disagree with, and they may just be
right. However, I feel that as long as we have a 100 different newspapers with very similar content to choose from,
competition will drive the vanilla pay wall down. This of course also assumes
that the quality of content will converge across news publications.)
As it comes to
content and presentation, I agree that for a few years, all major newspapers
will invest heavily in creating the best UI and UX for their subscribers and
attracting maximum footfall to earn through pay walls and ads.
However, with time and technological advancements, news apps and websites will begin to look
like each other and the lines of content differentiation will blur. (Hint –
think how iOS and Android seem to be increasingly mirroring each other with
every newer version released)
Hence, even though differentiation will exist in theory, it will
not be as strong a force of attraction as is touted today.
Well then, what happens next?
Imagine, if you will, the following scenario:
All the newspapers of a country come under two (max 3)
umbrellas: NewsOrg A and NewsOrg B. They will operate by publishing National
News, World News, and then begin to localize news to every town and district of
the country (hyper-localization). There will, in effect be an ‘integration and
differentiation’ effect that will arise due to excessive competition and
falling margins.
Other ‘publications’ that should thrive would be specialized
and niche, e.g. ones dealing only with sports, or technology or medicine.
Readers would subscribe to them similar to joining interest groups on all major
social networking websites.
Where does this leave us?
- Lesser players giving out the same (or maybe more) information by achieving efficiencies of scale
- Users will have ample option for personalization
(selecting news from India, then only Bangalore, besides Bollywood and Mobile Technology)
- Advertising will be more targeted, hence ad
revenues should rise
- With increased personalization, pay walls for
niche content may start making sense again
What the future holds is of course a mystery (except for the
inventers of the much awaited time machine), but our present undoubtedly is
witnessing a massive change, and the times are truly exciting!
Vidushi Kapoor
