Independent UK newspaper to cease as print edition | Hacker News Reader

Independent UK newspaper to cease as print edition

bbc.co.uk

56 pointskerrsclyde46 comments

Somebody posted this on Reddit which I thought was insightful. Newspapers are just not selling anymore. Why would I buy a printed newspaper when I have the most up to date news in my hand already?

From Reddit:

Every national newspaper is seeing double digit decreases in circulation - at this rate the print editions will be gone in 5 - 7 years. The independent was worse off than everyone else, so this shouldn't be a surprise.

Newspaper Average circulation as of June 2015, Year-on-year % change

Daily Mirror 855,987 -10.71

Daily Record 191,042 -10.68

Daily Star 416,379 -10.83

The Sun 1,818,935 -10.56

Daily Express 432,565 -9.83

Daily Mail 1,626,846 -2.79

The Daily Telegraph 489,739 -4.83

Financial Times 214,256 -2.85

The Guardian 171,218 -7.61

i 274,556 -4.12

The Independent 57,930 -8.78

The Times 389,409 -1.05

Edit: Formatting

Urgh, the bloody Daily Mail will outlive us all.

Daily mail and Financial Times readers possibly the least adepts to the electronic age? There's a joke in there somewhere.

I know you're only joking, but actually the Daily Mail is probably one of the most trafficked new sites in the world

It is - but there's a surprisingly large difference between the content of their website and their print edition.

Is the difference enough to make up for it being the Daily Mail?

The Daily Mail (and all the tabloids) mastered clickbait avant la lettre; sensationalist headlines, sex scandal combined with moral outrage, 'celebrity' news, occasional gore, noisy patriotism. That's the news the public want to buy.

The Mail's website has some truly masterful product placement. Go to the sidebar of shame and pick one of the "female celebrity wears clothes in public" articles. Embedded in it will be a very detailed and 'helpful' ad for whatever the celebrity is wearing. Those must be worth a fortune.

I have to say, I'd find those very helpful... Except most celebs wear stuff that doesn't really fit your average fat slob (me), or even most decent people. I always wonder what woman would actually want to wear the trash these people choise, but I guess there must be a lot of them, or that feature would have stopped long ago.

The Daily Mail regularly commits acts of simple journalism. For example, any sort of "it bleeds, it leads" crisis, from terrorism to when a tornado hit my home town killing 160 people, it's a great place to see a bunch of relevant photos and get the basic facts.

They also do this sort of thing, granted, for both, in a sensational style, for a variety of topics that just aren't covered by the US mainstream media monoculture.

(I've never noticed this to be true of any other British tabloid.)

The Daily Mail (and The Sun for that matter) know the profits come from customers who are least likely to use the internet. That's why the Daily Mail differs so much between the internet and newspaper versions.

The Independent has a daily circulation of 60,000

My site How a Car Works has a fairly engaged daily readership of just over 10,000.

The site earns around $50 per day.

Conclusion: The Independent's ad sales team is a lot better at selling ads than you are?

Print ads sell for a lot more than web ads.

With print rapidly dying, a re-negotiation might happen.

That's definitely true. I'm completely hopeless at sales.

But I've contracted Google (via Adsense) to sell my ads. For which I pay them a ~30% commission. Conclusion: the Independent's ad sales team is a lot better at selling ads than Google's algorithms.

News papers tend not to be that profitable they are owned by people as a status symbol and a tool.

In many places owning a news paper is like owning a sports team or a gallery it's partially philanthropical.

I don't put media and philanthropy in the same sentence. The media is manipulative and self-seeking. As one example, during the last federal election, my local newspaper told me who to vote for. They glossed over the candidate's policies and honed in on popularity.

Lol, and philantropy is not "self seeking and manipulative"? Do you think all those magnates donating to libraries did it out if sheer love, or rather to make people forget their reckless and rapacious acts in other fields? And the best thing is, philantropy works great to manipulate perceptions, even better than press. BillG used to be the guy who "stole the Mac UI", "killed Netscape" and "embraced and extinguished", to the point of being lampooned on The Simpsons for being a brutal mobster. Then his Foundation happened, and now he's a shiny beacon of virtue. Same for "peeping Zuck".

No. The Independent's adverts are terrible. I really like some of their writers but the adverts are so terrible that I rarely go there. Have you seen the 20 gmail tricks?

I used to work for a news paper website. We sold display and site-takover ads for many times the CPM that you'd get for Google ads.

To find roughly what advertisers pay just google "sitename rate card" and you'll get the list price. Actual price might be less (if they are having problems selling it all) but in many cases it will be close (or at least ballpark) to what ads are actually selling for.

Example:

http://www.independent.co.uk/advertising-guide/rate-cards-an...

Shows they are/were selling at between £20-40 per CPM for various banners.

The indipendent has become trash. Reputation completly ruined in the last 4 years.

Completely agree. The thing that makes me concerned for some of the better journalism they still occasionally produce is that the website is absolute dog shit. They are just going to end up being Lebedev's buzzfeed at this rate.. Big fall from grace for a decent title IMO.

It's a shame because there isn't much to read in the centre, the Guardian is too left wing for my tastes. I think I'll just stick with the Economist now.

The Guardian has not been left-wing for at least 6 years, if not 20. They repositioned when Blair did. And if you call Blair left-wing, I'll cry :)

The are left wing in the identity politics sense. Ridiculously so.

I guess you could read it like that. In my view, those are "big-tent issues" who can easily switch allegiance, as they did in 2010 (when a lot of votes moved to the Lib Dems on this or that narrow policy position). The main left-right discriminant for me remains the approach to structural economic issues, and on those the Graun clearly decided to give up in the Blair years. But I see your point.

The Times website sits behind a paywall, so their print circulation is not telling the whole story

Same with the FT - their site states they have "a combined paid print and digital circulation of 780,000"

http://aboutus.ft.com/corporate-information/ft-company/#axzz...

10 years ago you would likely predict numerous national newspapers would stop their print versions but this is the first major casualty we've had in recent history. Given these figures there will soon be more.

I wonder how this relates to freebie papers like the Metro?

Their circulation numbers are usually so high and their costs so low, that they'll be the last to go. You could literally print 20 pages of infomercials there and someone would still pick it up.

Please note, that the only ones that have a circulation of near or above one million are the tabloids. So (for now) tabloids can still make money from sale and from advertisement. At the same time, they are cheaper to produce than serious media (buy some photos of celebrities, write catchy headlines). They are also cheaper to distribute (sell through kiosks and supermarkets).

If you ever considered running a serious print media, take a look at the numbers. If Financial Times, The Guardian, The Independent or The Times can't do it in the English language, in a country with a population of 64 million, then it must be really hard. Try that in any smaller language or country. As an industry, print media is dead.

Doesn't the Financial Times compete more with The Wall Street Journal and, say, The Economist than those other papers you cite? I know they make a serious pitch of that sort to people like me and my father, and we'd have accepted it if our interests were more international.

The Grauniad is a tabloid now, has been for a few years. The Times is still a broadsheet.

The Guardian isn't a tabloid in either the physical sense or the metaphorical (it's a Berliner).

Similarly, the Times is definitely a tabloid in the physical sense.

Both newspapers are reasonably far from tabloid in their content.

I still buy the Sunday Times most weekends. Why? Because I'm not buying it for the 'news'. I'm buying it for the guaranteed insights I trust it for and the presentation style I enjoy. Very few blogs or news sites really nail this the way print does, nor the moments of serendipity when you're browsing through a paper and something catches your eye.

News magazines have always been about that kind of thing, and are generally better at it than newspapers. I read Prospect on the train a fair bit, or Time (European edition - I've heard the US edition is relatively dumbed down) sometimes. The Spectator and the Economist are or at least were good at such insights as well.

What terrible news. The independent website is terrible. It is one of the slowest, most bloated sites I've ever used. Average page size is several megabytes, page layout jams during loads and restarts several times.

Well maybe now with them throwing more resources towards it it will improve? One can only hope.

I agree, some newspaper's web offerings have been awful in terms of page load and user experience. Not singling any of them out, but I went to a popular UK newspaper's site; it loads hundreds of assets and almost crashes my tablet, and even once it loads half the screen real estate was taken up by a big advert and tiny font in the article.

The Guardian (and BBC News) seem to be the only ones taking this seriously so far, and maybe coincidence but I now go to those sites a lot more these days when I'm on my tablet.

Some of these companies should take the web more seriously (rather than some side offering they don't really care about) before its too late.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet/entries/b2c6502f-7b54-4f...

http://usabilitypost.com/2014/05/09/patrick-hamann-on-making...

Is the BBC news site any good? I used to use it a lot in its old form, when there was less whitespace and more content. When I look at it now it seems like there's barely anything there. Most of the stories appear to be videos, which I rarely bother watching.

One of the (paper) publications I most enjoy reading is Private Eye, which has a very messy layout with virtually no whitespace, is mostly black and white and has lots of information.

Pity the Guardian's website is pretty much the best thing about it nowadays. It used to have good content and a reasonably informed worldview, but now it seems to be just another tabloid going for the Buzzfeed type audience and sacrificing its credibility in the process.

Interesting to see the Guardian saying "It may not have the status of a grand “legacy brand” such as the BBC, the New York Times or indeed the Guardian". As a 28-year old, the Independent has been there all my life, and its brand is every bit the equal of those three.

Relevant commentary, which I think cuts through much of the nonsense about the future of hard copy news:

When the Tribune Company recently got rid of their newspapers, the New York Times ran the story under a headline “The Tribune Company’s publishing unit is being spun off, as the future of print remains unclear.”

The future of print remains what? Try to imagine a world where the future of print is unclear: Maybe 25 year olds will start demanding news from yesterday, delivered in an unshareable format once a day. Perhaps advertisers will decide “Click to buy” is for wimps. Mobile phones: could be a fad. After all, anything could happen with print. Hard to tell, really.

Meanwhile, back in the treasurer’s office, have a look at this chart. Do you see anything unclear about the trend line?

<Graph showing newspaper ad revenue dropping from >$60 billion in 2000 to <$20 billion in 2010. Click link below to see it.>

- Clay Shirky, "Last Call", 19 Aug 2014

https://medium.com/@cshirky/last-call-c682f6471c70

Keep in mind that this is one data point in a long series.

The Christian Science Monitor, once one of the highest-quality newspapers in America, went full digital a few years ago. The New Orleans Times Picayune, like many local and regional papers, now prints only a few days a week. The New York Times and others have shrunk their print editions from the former, larger "broadsheet" format. The Financial Times published its "sunset" plan for exiting print a few years ago. The list goes on and on.

(In the case of The Independent, it was previously rescued by the Russian oligarch Alexander Lebedev. Like Facebook mogul Chris Hughes and his New Republic debacle, he found that the easiest way to become a millionaire in the news business is to start out as a billionaire...)

Print newspapers of a certain size are still a profitable business, if decreasingly so. While digital versions of those publications are the future, traditional media companies have largely fumbled that future, and they have been fumbling it since the mid-1990s.

Now they float in an ocean of free content produced by smaller newsrooms and full of aggregators cribbing their hard-won investigative pieces for the price of an intern. Some of that free content is coming from news organizations that are attached to a more profitable business than selling ads. Verizon's media properties come to mind. Bloomberg LP makes its money selling monthly terminal subscriptions to financial data. You could say that Mike Bloomberg's greatest act of philanthropy has been to subsidize Bloomberg News.

Newspapers were slow to recognize the decline to their advertising engine, and largely inept at responding to it. Many of them, including SF's tech blogs, are limping along as events organizers that happen to publish daily updates.

There's a lot of room to experiment in plugging news machines into other business models. The thing to keep in mind, as we do so, is that those publications will usually fail to cover one topic fairly: their owners.

another one bites the dust... Les paroles s'envolent mais les ecrits restent... I wonder in which category cloud-backed digital media is... We have self supporting writings that are 3000 years old, will we have the same for things said that go against the grain for this era?

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