Newspaper 2.0

During our FTTH NL 2009 conference, I spoke with a journalist from the NRC newspaper, a 'quality' newspaper in the Netherlands. During my own presentation I claimed that dinosaurs take a long time to die, but in the end they actually do. Think PSTN, CATV, broadcast TV, newspapers. Of course, the man smirked at me 'so my newspaper is going to die'?

Ironically, the very same NRC edition that contained a review of our conference, also carried the news of The Independent closing down. And today, a local newspaper in Leeuwarden is in desperate need of EUR 100m.

Looking a little more closely at the chances of survival for newspapers, it is useful to distinguish between form, content and other services.

Form:

• Paper: clearly on its way out, with Amazon's Kindle going worldwide. Still, nice for specific locations (public transport, restaurants, etc.). In the long run: a typical dinosaur.
• E-reader: saves newspapers a lot in terms of paper, ink and distribution costs. But who is going to pay? There is some resemblance to the femtocell conundrum. Will the end user be willing to pay for a piece of hardware that saves his provider a lot of money?
• Netbook: if newspaper companies adjust their websites to the specs of a laptop or netbook, then they won't need to venture into the risky e-reader market. Instead, they could subsidise netbooks. If they make their websites fully for-pay only, they could make an offer to their subscribers: if you give up your print edition, we will give you a netbook and you can download our newspaper every day for a reduced subscription fee. If they score an MVNO deal, they could have the download process automated and performed daily (or even several times a day) over a 2G or 3G connection (cf. Amazon).

Content:

• News: AP, AFP and Reuters aren't going away. Newspapers, relying on printing syndicated news from these sources alone, are on their way out.
• Background stories, in-depth reporting, interviews: here is where a newspaper's value is, I believe.

Other services:

• Non-content: My NRC newspaper is venturing into community services that are especially appealing to its rather well-defined demographic: trips, books, CDs. Perhaps these services reduce churn somewhat, but I doubt they add much value.
• Content: Since newspapers are in the content industry, they could become portals for customised content by adding related content from a variety of sources. They could add books, blogs etc. to their daily newspaper download to the subsidised netbooks or e-readers.
• Other: newspapers have a billing relation and a more or less well-defined reader demographic, which in theory positions them to become MVNOs or even RSPs on broadband networks.

NEWSPAPERS://Another free paper to hit the Dutch market

Tomorrow a new free daily will hit the Dutch market, simply called Dagblad De Pers ('Daily The Press'). Obviously, they couldn't claim the 'De Pers' name for being too generic.

I posted before on this paper. The main characteristics are:

• Vis-à-vis existing freebies (Metro and Telegraaf's Spits): De Pers will be a 'quality' paper with more extensive distribution, i.e. not exclusively on public transportation (railway stations), but at 'retail, petrol and office' as well. In fact, my employer will allow the De Pers guys to drop of a bunch of papers every day. It seems that the people over at Telegraaf and Metro are pretty nervous over the new entrant. Metro has just made a smart move: they secured a deal with retailer Super de Boer (300 locations), which will extend their circulation to 535k (from 430k). On the other hand, Metro lost the exclusive right to distribute through railway stations, and it is rumoured that De Pers has already moved in at a cost of 1.2m EUR/annum.
• Vis-à-vis subscription papers: De Pers obviously has the advantage of having an advertising-based business model, but it has a substantial number of negatives: no door-to-door distribution, no weekend edition, no brand recognition (even worse: despite its ambition to be a 'quality' newspaper, being free puts it in the low quality Metro/Spits market). Originally, entrepreneur Marcel Boekhoorn (who made his fortune buying Telfort for EUR 25m and selling it to KPN for almost a billion) planned the paper as a joint venture with PcM (which publishes a set of quality newspapers, including NRC, Trouw and Volkskrant, combined circulation 720k). PcM changed its mind (Boekhoorn is now trying to squeeze some funds from PcM for exiting discussions at a late stage), but now appears to be interested in starting its own free paper.