The end for newspapers?

I went along to a fascinating discussion this evening titled "Is this the end of newspapers?", organised by the Association for Scottish Public Affairs. A significant section of the debate centred around the immediacy of online comment and how it is important to get your message out quickly so, with that in mind, I am sure that a 'rapid response' account of the evening won't be resented by any who were there.

The invited speakers were three-strong. Mike Wilson (Director of allmediascotland.com), Stewart Kirkpatrick (former editor of scotsman.com, blogger and Content Marketing Director of W00tonomy) and Craig McGill (writer, PR guru and blogger). They were all simply excellent.

The exchanges started with the old quote that journalists and politicians should share a similar relationship to that enjoyed between a dog and a lamppost although it is clear that as the number of politicians increases, the number of journalists is decreasing.

Consequently, the question of whether newspapers truly are the optimum medium for communicating with voters was raised which was reinforced with this enjoyable quote from Guido Fawkes:

The Dead Tree Press is a dead industry walking. It is not a twenty first century business model: slaughter half a forest of trees, pay NUJ rates for news gathering, sub-editing, laying out, employing friend’s children, transferring ink onto aforesaid trees, then pay people to work all night sending the slices of dead trees around the country in the dark on lorries. Finally when you get to the point of collecting some money, split the sales revenue with the people who take the money. It is laughable.

One of the most interesting points noted is that you get pretty much the same news in the Metro for free as you do in the Scotsman or Herald. You don't even have to go into a shop and fork out 75p for the Metro, it's sitting waiting for you on the bus or in the train stations.

Today's Scotsman and Metro is a case in point. News on Afghanistan, child attacks, Government bills, Diageo, independence and that lemur that tried to grab the mouse that failed (see photo). The news was in The Scotsman and it was in the Metro. Why bother with the former when the latter is so freely available?

The message seemingly is that news has no value. Fact is free and infinitely copyable. Indeed, on most days we know what the news is before we open the newspaper thanks to blogs, BBC and the radio.

The salvation for newspapers appears to lie with analysis and commentary. Increase the quality and you increase your value to a customer.

Even beyond newspapers, news can have a value even if it does not generate a wide readership. For many, a targetted, controlled readership is more meaningful than getting a story onto page 18 of a daily newspaper. Through blogs and Twitter not only can you know exactly who you are sharing information with, you can also receive instant feedback. One big readership has been fragmented into many small readerships so how can a newspaper possibly catch everyone with a single edition each day?

It all comes back to quality. An honest and passionate writer, be they a professional newspaper journalist or an amateur blogger, should come through this current difficult time relatively unscathed but British papers raising their game to the necessary quality may be a tough ask.

After all, many European newspapers that are growing their business have their leader columns on page 3, unafraid to put intellectual considerations front and centre of what they are all about.

Open many British newspapers to page 3 today and what do you get? A lemur trying to grab a fieldmouse.

It does make you wonder which direction we are headed in...