iPad: Saviour of the newspaper industry?

©Alex Evans 2011

For hundreds of years, the newspaper has been a staple component of the morning routine for millions of people around the world. From businessmen vanishing behind the vast expanse of their broadsheets on the Underground to builders sat in Transit vans trying not to drip brown sauce on page 3, newspapers have for many years, and for millions of people, been absolutely essential.

But perhaps not for much longer. The internet, for all that it’s given us – better communication, cheaper shopping, social networking, has the newspaper squarely in its crosshairs. After all, why spend £1 on a lump of messy paper, half of which you won’t read, when you can pick and choose news content on the internet, free of charge?

Print circulation is in sharp decline. Average net circulation of daily newspapers has dropped 15% in four years, down from 11.5million in May 2007 to 9.8million in May 2011, according to figures published in The Times, Friday July 15 2011.

The same research suggests print costs have risen by 20% in the last year while advertising revenues for, as an example,  The Daily Mail, are down 7% in three months. Meanwhile, the cost of newspapers has risen – The Guardian, The Independent and The Daily Telegraph have all risen from 70p to £1 in the last four years, while The Times has moved from 65p to £1, The Daily Mail has risen from 45p to 55p and The Financial Times has doubled, from £1 to £2.

It all adds up to a situation in which newspapers are trapped in a self-defeating cycle – the more circulation dwindles, the more prices rise – and the further prices rise, the quicker circulation drops. 

According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, The Daily Telegraph has dropped from 911,454 to 651,184 daily circulation between 2007 and 2011. The Times has dropped from 670,054 to 457,250, while The Guardian has dropped from 384,070 to 279,308. Of these four, only The Daily Mail has seen a small decline (in terms of percentage of overall readership) – from 2,354,028 to 2,136,568. 

The one factor pointed out by analysts most often as the cause of this plunge in readership is the free online news movement.

Newspapers have reacted very differently to this new environment where news is quick, simple and free. The Daily Mail’s website is incredibly successful, pulling in millions of unique users every day, offsetting declining print circulation. But others have fought against it – The Times have locked their content behind a paywall, pushing readers to identify the newspaper’s web output as something worth paying for – with mixed results.

There is, though, one last saviour for traditional print publications: tablet computers, like the iPad. Apple’s hefty slab of screen is the first device which can actually mimic a newspaper exactly. The huge, bright screen lends itself perfectly to presenting full versions of newspaper pages identical to those sitting on newsstands. Indeed, The Times’ iPad app does exactly this – repacking the newspaper every day into a digital edition, complete with turnable pages and, unlike print, added interactivity.

The iPad offers newspapers and magazines a lifeline. A chance to sell their newspaper as a whole, as it was meant to be, complete with rich analysis, opinion and photographs. Never mind web pages with short stories written to gain immediate traffic, the iPad can deliver the deeper newspaper experience in digital format. Crucially – people are willing to pay.

How many people? And will this news revolution turn the whole industry to tablet computers overnight?

Certainly, from talking to newspaper and magazine editors and senior journalists from across the country, there seems to be hope. Hope that the same generation who buy iPods to listen to music, not CDs, the same generation who rent films over the internet rather than buy DVDs, the same generation who want everything with them, everywhere they go, in one device might want to buy newspapers for those devices.

iPad might not kill the newspaper industry – it might just save it.

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This is the introduction to my University dissertation; for confidentiality reasons I cannot publish any further excerpts, but any feedback is appreciated. This is an update of an earlier article from April, fleshed out after interviews with three major newspapers. All writing ©Alex Evans 2011.

Can the iPad really kill the newspaper?

It's 7am: you lean over your toast, pour some orange juice and flick through the morning paper, chewing over the news while chewing your breakfast.

Only, it's not a 'paper' at all, it's a big square lump of plastic, glass and silicon - an iPad, running the top news apps, flashing up the latest headlines.

For thousands, this scene is already a reality - but will a future where every newspaper is delivered digitally, instantly, and in a proper newspaper format, ever become the present?

What the iPad is packing in 2011 is already enough to put the traditional newspaper under threat if you're a Times reader. For £2 a week, you get the latest version of the paper streamed straight to your iPad every morning, with all the same headlines, pictures, text and layout as the traditional print version - except upgraded to be interactive. It literally marries the best bits of both formats into one impressive - and inexpensive - package.

Other news organisations have been slower off the mark, though. None of the others can boast a digital offering as complete or as comprehensive as Murdoch's outlet. But other papers are slowly coming on board, and it's only a matter of time before we see the likes of The Guardian, The Independent and The Sun get their papers digitised.

Even if we do get to the stage where every notable news outlet is offering their own complete-paper app, will it really spell the end for traditional ink and paper news?

Well, there are several hurdles to vault first. For one thing, iPads are expensive. Really, really expensive. Even if the tech-savvy, cash-rich of the 20-40 group gobble up pads and news apps like there's no tomorrow, that still leaves the rather sizeable group of everyone else who still like to read their news from a piece of paper.

Here in Sheffield, there are fiftysomething blokes in peaked caps whom I'm almost certain are never going to trade up their Daily Bilge for the iPad version while chatting about snuff in their local greasy spoon. Joking aside, there are literally millions of people who for one reason or another just won't take to reading newspapers in a digital form, even if it looks largely identical.

One option often mooted among the media is that papers should give free iPads out on a subscription model, like how mobile operators subsidise phones in exchange for your loyalty. To anyone with an interest in news but without the ability to stretch to £600, this is likely to be much more popular.

But even then, asking people to put another monthly subscription on their overheads, let alone carry a hefty slice of news device everywhere they go, is a big step.

But these are teething problems. The fact is, the iPad, Kindle and Android tablets are increasingly becoming home to a like-for-like version of traditional newspapers, complete with turnable pages and all the same content of a newspaper. One day, you'll wake up and each newspaper and magazine you subscribe to will have been wirelessly streamed to you in your sleep.

Whether that really means that one day, one truly sad day, the printing presses really will grind to a halt remains to be seen.

But you can be sure that if that day comes, you'll probably read the news on your iPad.