On paper, yes, it’s all over. But is it?
Sales of newspapers continue to plummet. Yet the Netflix model and the pleasure of reading newsprint may yet save dead-tree journalism
‘Newspaper people shouldn’t assume that decline can’t be stopped’
One of my more melancholy tasks is studying the latest newspaper circulation figures. It is melancholy because, for more than a decade, they have been in relentless decline. The most recent ones are no exception. The Sun – down nearly nine per cent year-on-year. The Daily Mail – down almost eight per cent. The Guardian – down nearly seven per cent, and now selling a mere 143,000 copies a day. It’s true that, over the same period, the Daily Telegraph and Times have posted slight increases, but that is only because they have been pumping out more so-called ‘bulk’ (i.e. free) copies to boost their figures.
It seems impossible to deny that printed versions of newspapers are on death row. On present trends, the Guardian will be selling fewer than 100,000 copies a day within a very few years, at which point it would surely follow the example of the Independent and stop the presses.
Throughout what used to be called Fleet Street, there is a general assumption that the demise of the printed newspaper is inevitable. The average age of readers climbs every year (on some titles, it is over 60) and it seems young people will only read newspapers that are free on the web, where the attention span of a gnat is no impediment. Sooner or later, the older print readers will die, and there will regrettably be no one left.
But might the pessimism be overdone? There is a flicker of evidence – no more – that in America the so-called millennial generation is showing an unexpected willingness to pay for news. Since last November’s election, for example, the New Yorker magazine has enjoyed an increased in subscribers of 129 per cent in the 25-34 age group. The Atlantic magazine is attracting new, younger readers to roughly the same extent. The New York Times reports ‘seeing similar trends’, while even the right-wing Wall Street Journal has doubled its student subscribers over the past year. According to a report by the Reuters Institute in Oxford, the United States was the only country that experienced a significant increase last year in the number of people paying for online news. Some of the young are buying the printed version.
It is an old adage that social trends in America are often replicated here five or ten years later. Might this be true of newspapers? According to Nic Newman of the Reuters Institute, two major things are happening in the US. One is Trump, who is attracting young readers in appalled fascination. The other development is that the success of streaming services such as Netflix and Spotify, for which one has to pay, is helping to implant the thought in young minds that it might be necessary to part with some money to read good journalism.
Maybe something else is going on too. Maybe a few young people are waking up to the revolutionary idea that reading a newspaper or magazine can be more rewarding, and even more convenient, than peering at a screen.
Of course, these are only tiny fragments of evidence. In any case, what happens in America need not happen here. Moreover, the proposition that younger people are prepared to pay for news has to be tested in this country. Yet unlike its American counterparts, the Guardian remains determined to sell its wares absolutely free online, which has obviously accelerated the decline of its print version.
All the same, we should avoid fatalism. When the herd clings unthinkingly to a piece of received wisdom, it is often wrong. Five years ago, many people in publishing were forecasting the death of the book. But actually the book has staged a surprising comeback because reading on a Kindle or tablet is far from ideal. I don’t suggest for a moment that print circulation is ever going to recover, but newspaper people shouldn’t assume that decline must continue inexorably, and can’t be stopped.
Journalists of every political stripe seem to like the play Ink (which I haven’t yet seen). They usually say it offers a realistic and not unsympathetic portrayal of journalism, and of the tabloids in particular. More surprising still, it is widely suggested that the young Rupert Murdoch in the play is not the left-wing hate figure one might have expected. Susannah Clapp in the Guardian wrote that Ink ‘shows a youngish Murdoch squaring up to various rigid establishments: the English class system and union regulations. At times, you might almost use the word “principles” in the same sentence as his name.’
Might the 86-year-old media tycoon be enjoying some sort of cultural rehabilitation? The Polly Toynbees of all this world will doubtless always hate him. In their minds, he was the architect of phone-hacking (though there’s no evidence he knew about it) and the corrupter of working-class minds. But there are other entries in the ledger. Rupert Murdoch has saved the Times, successfully bet his farm on satellite television, and provided entertainment for an awful lot of people.