I recently spoke at a publishing conference in Beijing, China. I was very interested in a presentation by Steve Yelvington, a newspaper strategist working for Cox Newspapers in the USA, who addressed the issues facing newspapers in evaluating their publishing strategies for print and the Internet. For most of the year 2004, I have been watching a number of interesting events happening in newspapers worldwide as publishers look at their options for developing their businesses. I want to look at some of these in this article.

Newspapers have been working with the Internet now for over a decade. Initially newspapers simply treated the Internet as a medium to replicate their print editions, with little thought for developing a new business. In those times the “Web” edition was put together by a small group of technologists, rather than a business group of editorial, advertising and business staff. The Web editions were not designed to compete with the print editions. Advertising was limited and key sections like classified advertisements were often just replicated from the print edition. A few publishers saw new opportunities for business, such as Süddeutsche Zeitung in Germany who created a major motor advertisement portal. For most newspapers, the Web edition was just a prestige operation that lost money. I remember hearing the Vice President responsible for the Internet editions of USA Today, speaking at an American Newspaper Publisher’s event. She stated that newspapers had lost the battle of the Internet to other organizations. USA Today at that time had the highest Internet publishing revenues of any newspaper in the World. It however had found it could not compete as a major web portal against companies like AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo in attracting site visitors.

Since those mid to late 1990s times, things have changed significantly for newspapers. Print revenues have continued to drop as more people gave up reading printed newspapers. The biggest drop appears to have been in afternoon and evening newspapers, which have been particularly hit by readers switching to get information from radio, TV and the Internet. Circulation falls are not new, and printed newspaper circulations have been dropping slowly for almost fifty years. It is just that it has increased in recent years. This was seen particularly in people below twenty-five years of age, who just were not starting to read newspapers.