HOW DOES A DYING INDUSTRY COPE?
It’s no secret the world has been rapidly changing before our eyes. As we all understand that the world keeps evolving and new things always come to replace the old, sometimes you can’t help but feel nostalgia about this loss.
Some used to say: “Why bother buying CDs and DVDs when you can store thousands of music and movie files in your computer?”. Today they say: “Why bother downloading anything at all when you can stream it online?”
Newspapers and magazines are no different. In fact, print media in Thailand is now facing a grim future. Newspapers have always been a favourite of those who live in the Kingdom. The clean broadsheet layout and the smell of paper often accompanies a cup of coffee for many who enjoy the morning time in the city. Today, those days are virtually gone, as the newspaper has been replaced by the smartphone and other modern media.
A few years ago we became familiar with advertising phrases for new book releases like “See you next week at your local bookstall”. But today we can’t even seem to locate a bookstall or newspaper stand.
The fact is that the media industry has been having a rough time for more than a decade already. Affected by plummeting advertising revenues and changing consumer behaviours, the global print-decline problem has finally caught up with Thailand’s publishers.
We saw the print industry continue to face the stark realities of digital disruption. Print readership is steadily declining, newspapers are closing down, and journalists with decades of experience are forced to seek other jobs — starting with LokWanNee in 2014 and Baan Muang in 2016, followed by Post Today and M2F, the Bangkok Post’s Thai-language sister newspapers that stopped print publication earlier this year.
And, more recently, readers were stunned to hear that The Nation announced the discontinuation of the print edition of the Bangkok-based English daily 48 years after it launched, in 1971, with its last issues scheduled for June 28.
This leaves the Bangkok Post as the only English-language national daily. But for how long?
According to Nielsen Co, a leading global-data-measurement company, the Thai newspaper industry’s advertising revenues have declined continuously since 2013. What stood at 15.4 billion baht in 2006 fell to 12.3 billion baht in 2015. The figures for January 2019 show that the biggest fall in advertising income hit magazines, where advertising revenues across Thailand declined by over 33% to 69 million baht. Newspapers in Thailand saw their advertising revenue plummet by over 19%, to 361 million baht for last month.
With shrinking advertising income, smaller papers, early retirement and downsizing, hiring freezes have become the norm in the falling newspaper industry. Experts and journalists agree that the physical newspaper is in terminal decline
as an industry, and acknowledge that print in Thailand is a sunset industry.
This, however, is an unfair assessment. In this digital age, publishers just aren’t sure of how best to deal with many of the challenges they face today. By experimenting with different methods of keeping readers interested, the news industry is still working relentlessly to keep journalism alive.
In response, major newspapers have made considerable changes. They’re attempting to adapt and combat diminishing reader interest by shortening stories, and, most notably, going online and using social media to their advantage.
Last month, the Nation Multimedia Group CEO, Somchai Meesen, confirmed reports but promised there would be no job losses of editorial staff, as the company would continue to work and focus full-time on online platforms, including a proposed new Chinese-language Thai news service scheduled for the end of this year — and that’s one of the tactics.
But while there’s no real answer for what the future holds for the printing industry, there are a few more questions, such as what will actually happen when print newspapers start to disappear in large numbers? Will those print readers just become digital readers? Will they spend as much time consuming local news on their smartphones and tablets as on their newspapers at the breakfast table? Wouldn’t they all become a lot like the new generation of digital readers — easily distracted, switching from link to link, allergic to depth of information?
Hopefully, print is not going away anytime soon, but publishing companies will surely continue struggling to survive. Publishers may face a tough challenge in adapting to non-paying online readers. The cultural threats against media, though, is a challenge not only for Thai newspapers and magazines, but for every reader.
Newspapers have adapted by shortening stories, and, most notably, going online and using social media to their advantage