Last year's 5.3 per cent boost in newspaper advertising revenues, revealed to the global press as the largest increase in years on the opening day of the recent World Newspaper Congress, set a markedly upbeat tone for the publishers gathered in Seoul to chart the right course forward for a sector seen by many to be in terminal decline.
Gavin O'Reilly, president of the congress host, the World Association of Newspapers, has little time for nay-sayers, declaring that newspapers have dominated the media landscape for 400 years, surviving the arrival of several new media -- namely radio, television and the internet -- that were all supposed to make print obsolescent, according to forecasters at the time. "It's hard to see the full-time whistle blowing quite yet," O'Reilly says.
Industry stats unveiled in Seoul bear O'Reilly's optimism out, with global circulation enjoying an all-time high, ad revenue at a four- year peak and online readership soaring, up by a third in 2004 and by 350 per cent over the last five years.
The industry's vigour can largely be attributed to developing markets, especially in Asia, where the billion-plus populations of India and China promise huge potential growth and Japan remains one of the world's keenest readers of newspapers, publishing seven of the world's 10 best-selling dailies.
Nevertheless, stats can be misleading, especially in Asia, where the absence of official circulation figures can muddy the picture as to the true health of the industry.
If the congress started in a bouyant mood, it finished on a more sober note as Saatchi & Saatchi CEO Kevin Roberts warned the assembled press that they are drifting slowly to oblivion. "Newspapers must wake up to the fact that they are not only losing share, but the market itself is under threat," Roberts says, arguing that intiatives currenlty undetaken by the industry, including new electronic platforms, reformatting to smaller friendlier paper sizes or new pricing models -- key Congress talking points -- were only slowing the medium's decline rather than reversing it. "When a hurricane comes, do you build a shelter, or do you build wind farms?" he asks.
Deploring the lack of brand-building by titles in favour of ads geared around short-term promotions, Roberts suggests that newspapers learn from consumer goods companies, which have built durable and successful brands on the understanding that the customer is boss.
"A lot has been written about the business of newspapers, but very little has been written about the readers of newspapers," Roberts says. "The consumer or reader no longer seems to be the centre of your universe. Newspapers are still defining what news is, not consumers."
Roberts recommended newspapers undertake root and branch reviews of what they are, giving up a fight they cannot win to be a carrier of news, providing instead an alternative to the glut of bad news transmitted by other media with "solutions, debate, advice and counsel" designed to uplift rather than depress. At the same time, newspaper marketing should refocus from driving short-term sales to long-term brand loyalty.
Newspaper bosses are caught in a dilemma, wary of abandoning their heritage in case it alienates long-standing readers, but remaining acutely conscious of the need to make fundamental changes to survive. "You cannot replace development of the paper itself by line extensions and new supplements," says Bengt Braun, president and CEO of Bonnier Sweden, speaking at a conference session entitled The Newspaper Renaissance. "Most important is that you continuously improve the mother product."
Braun cautions, however, on presenting revolutionary face-lifts to readers who come into contact with the paper each morning over breakfast. "Be true to your heritage and the characteristics in the personality of the paper, whatever made it a success in the first place," he says.