To the point: It's that simple
Everyone seems to know what the daily newspaper of the future should look like. In countless presentations, at congresses, on the Internet, in interviews with experts or in articles by self-proclaimed media experts - everywhere it sounds the same. The newspaper of the future must be more relevant, more emotional, with more background, less news-heavy, more surprising, more explanatory, more beautiful, more service-oriented, more suitable for the target group and, above all, better written. Well, well!
Everyone seems to know what the daily newspaper of the future should look like. In countless presentations, at congresses, on the Internet, in interviews with experts or in articles by self-proclaimed media experts - everywhere it sounds the same. The newspaper of the future must be more relevant, more emotional, with more background, less news-heavy, more surprising, more explanatory, more beautiful, more service-oriented, more suitable for the target group and, above all, better written. Well, well!
Like a mantra, the desired qualities are repeated. Again and again and everywhere. Qualities that may sound good at first glance, but on closer inspection are nothing more than banal, traditional and hackneyed buzzwords. All those who make newspapers every day with their heart and soul and many years of experience have not fallen on their heads. If it were that simple, the newspaper of tomorrow would have been invented long ago, and the decline in readers of subscription daily newspapers would be a thing of the past. Or even more likely, it would never have come to this.
But it's not that simple. There is the problem of price. There is a market problem, and there is also a problem with the business model.
People, especially the young, are used to getting all the information they need for free on the Internet. This statement is nonsense per se, because the Internet is not free. Access very much has to be paid for, what doesn't have to be paid for is the content used. The only problem is that the user does not realize that it costs him something. This is how free commuter newspapers were invented. A flop in many countries, a success in Switzerland. Well, a relative success! The first-mover 20 minutes is a success, Heute mutated into Blick am Abend, Cash Daily was discontinued, .ch was buried in the short term, 20 minutes and Matin bleu will be merged, if the Weko agrees. Whether the costs for the News newspaper will be borne by Tamedia for much longer remains to be seen. This is rather unlikely now that all competitors have gone.
All of these papers have or had appealing user numbers. As long as the economy was doing well, some of them had enough revenue from ads. But now, in the crisis, the revenues are not coming in. So the business model is only working to a very limited extent. Subscription daily newspapers have the same problem. Here, too, the business model is showing itself to be a fair-weather model. But what might a crisis-resistant business model look like? Answers to these questions would be interesting, but they are not so simple.
Pierre C. Meier, Editor-in-Chief
[email protected]
Like a mantra, the desired qualities are repeated. Again and again and everywhere. Qualities that may sound good at first glance, but on closer inspection are nothing more than banal, traditional and hackneyed buzzwords. All those who make newspapers every day with their heart and soul and many years of experience have not fallen on their heads. If it were that simple, the newspaper of tomorrow would have been invented long ago, and the decline in readers of subscription daily newspapers would be a thing of the past. Or even more likely, it would never have come to this.
But it's not that simple. There is the problem of price. There is a market problem, and there is also a problem with the business model.
People, especially the young, are used to getting all the information they need for free on the Internet. This statement is nonsense per se, because the Internet is not free. Access very much has to be paid for, what doesn't have to be paid for is the content used. The only problem is that the user does not realize that it costs him something. This is how free commuter newspapers were invented. A flop in many countries, a success in Switzerland. Well, a relative success! The first-mover 20 minutes is a success, Heute mutated into Blick am Abend, Cash Daily was discontinued, .ch was buried in the short term, 20 minutes and Matin bleu will be merged, if the Weko agrees. Whether the costs for the News newspaper will be borne by Tamedia for much longer remains to be seen. This is rather unlikely now that all competitors have gone.
All of these papers have or had appealing user numbers. As long as the economy was doing well, some of them had enough revenue from ads. But now, in the crisis, the revenues are not coming in. So the business model is only working to a very limited extent. Subscription daily newspapers have the same problem. Here, too, the business model is showing itself to be a fair-weather model. But what might a crisis-resistant business model look like? Answers to these questions would be interesting, but they are not so simple.
Pierre C. Meier, Editor-in-Chief
[email protected]
