What is the future of Print Media?
in News
Back in February just as The Independent announced the end to their print edition, Trinity Mirror’s new standalone paper ‘New Day’ popped up. But before you could blink it’s gone!
So, what happened to New Day?
New Day set to attempt to defy the decline of the UK’s print news industry and test the limits of success in this digital landscape. The paper’s objective was to target 35-55 year olds and entice readers who have lapsed out of print to come back to the market. However, this was harder than anticipated.
And this shows in the facts, just after nine weeks after launching, the paper was only selling 30,000 copies – not the 200,000 circulation that they had hoped for.
New Day came out declaring to be different than the rest with a reading time of 30 mins. The paper highly resembled ‘i’ and the ‘Metro’ with the appearance of almost like reading online with large images and graphics. Billing itself as chirpy, cheerful and feature driven, in New Day you’ll find no political bias – presenting both sides of the argument and giving the reader the option to make up their own mind.
Targeting predominately millennials in a world with access to instant news on outlets such as Twitter, perhaps they were unwilling to pay the 25p and 50p to read information that they can get elsewhere for free.
Was New Day impatient?
To launch and close in nine weeks isn’t much time to test the waters, especially in this media climate. However, the editor of I newspaper believes the paper’s demise has little to do with the challenges faced by print media.
Oliver Duff, thinks the marketing strategy was poor, pricing and the early deadlines which prevented coverage of breaking news contributes a lot to the no rise in growth in the paper.
He does believes we can learn a lot from New Day in the way they presented news. Perhaps not focusing heavily on celebrities but instead concentrating on stories on real people?
But is it New Day’s lack of news the culprit for its decline?
So what does this tell us about the future of print media?
There is no denying that the internet has taken a firm place in the way we digest news but the image the media themselves are painting about the decline in print isn’t all it seems.
With the UK currently selling over 7 million copies a day and April being the strongest month for print advertising, it appears the decline is a steady one. Whereas the Guardian may be struggling financially on the newsstand and the Independent taking all content online, The Telegraph, Daily Mail, Financial Times, The Sun, The Mirror and the Express are all seeing healthy profits.
This proves there is still an appetite for traditonal media and it’s likely that print media will never die but simply evolve hand in hand with digital.
What do you think the future holds for print?
