The future of newspapers

Last week, May 3, saw the media commemorate World Press Freedom Day. While most of the reports and discussions centred around the harassment of journalists and pressure on media houses by governments around the world, a much more existential threat faces the media.

The Internet -- that global web of inter-connected computers and mobile devices that has disrupted so much of society and the economy over the last 25 years -- has started taking its toll on traditional media.

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Most media people blame the Internet and social media for stealing their previously loyal audiences, something that reflects more than anything the media’s sense of entitlement and its inability to grasp the pattern of the new digital and Internet era.

The biggest mistake made and still being made by traditional media, is the view that the main purpose of the media is to hold government or political authorities to account.

The media is regarded as the “fourth estate” of the state, implying a watchdog role, and this is the source of the false sense of entitlement.

Certainly, government policies, budgets, announcements, laws and actions play an important part in national life and the media rightly covers these.
However, there is much more to society than government, something the media collectively seems unable to recognise.

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For decades, the general public was forced to go with what the media made a priority in its coverage (i.e., government business and political leaders) because there was no alternative to radio, television and print newspapers.

Because of this, advertisers were also forced to place their notices and brand promotional ads on newspaper pages on prime time radio and TV slots.

Since three-quarters of newspaper revenue came from advertising, both display and classified, newspapers thrived and, so, came to believe their focus on political reporting and analysis was the reason advertisers flocked to them.

Advertising and media became dove-tailed. Along came the Internet in the late 1990s and this historical dove-tailing of advertising with the media began to come apart.

Specialist classified ad websites like Craig’s List shook up the lucrative US newspaper classified market and specialised subject-matter websites soon became serious competitors to established newspaper titles.

The millions of websites that specialise in music, sports, fashion, history, pets, cars, cookery, politics, film, design, poetry, painting and many more subjects shows that there was a pent-up need for a hugely diverse range of topics and traditional media, with its tendency to focus newspaper front pages and TV lead stories on government or politics limited the public’s options.

Into the second half of the 2000s decade, technology companies such as Google and later Facebook, with their billion-strong user bases, naturally became more attractive to advertisers than national or regional newspapers, all focusing on government-related news.

The emergence of lifestyle and entertainment websites and apps such as Instagram and, over the last two years, TikTok, each with over one billion users, shows that the narrow focus by newspapers on presidents, parliaments, governments and elections was not a wise strategy.

I’ll give you an example. I do a lot of research into the tastes, thought and trends in society using data from Google. Here is an example of my recent research. Persons attracting the highest interest in Uganda: In the 24-hour period, April 22-23. 
Source: Google tracking data
1) Bobi Wine, 45%
2) Muhoozi Kainerugaba, 34%
3) David Lutalo, 26%
4) Yoweri Museveni, 19%
5) John Blaq, 17%
6) Sheebah Kalungi, 13%
7) Bebe Cool, 11%
This, remember, was the 24-hour period leading up to the party at Kololo and Lugogo to mark Lt Gen Muhoozi Kainerugaba’s birthday.

Naturally the media, with its default focus on government and figures of political interest or standing, gave much coverage to the build-up to Muhoozi.

However, this data from Google that tracks news reading, Google searches, Google Maps references and YouTube viewing time, shows that there was strong national interest in the musicians David Lutalo, Bebe Cool, John Blaq and Sheebah Kalungi.

How many potential buyers of print copies did Ugandan newspapers miss out on by either ignoring or not knowing about this interest in the leading Ugandan musicians?

This narrow view of the media’s role as being about holding government to account led to the present crisis facing print newspapers -- how to navigate the new reality of falling reader numbers and vanishing advertisement.

It should be noted that the Internet and digital technology have disrupted many other industries as well.
Starting about 2010 in Uganda, money transfer services introduced by the telecom companies ate into the retail, over-the-counter services that for decades had been the preserve of commercial banks.

Where in the 1990s long queue in bank halls were a familiar sight, today these banking halls are mostly empty, most of the time, as the public has shifted to the thousands of neighbourhood and trading centre mobile money kiosks.

To service this new, challenging media landscape, the print media needs to look to two important examples.
The first is the US and British financial newspapers, such as the Wall Street Journal and London’s Financial Times as well as the “quality” newspapers like The New York Times and London’s The Telegraph.
The second example is the American video-streaming services like Netflix, Disney +, and HBO and the music-streaming service Spotify.

In the early days of the Internet from 1994 to about 2012, newspapers published their content for free, working with the model of large numbers of readers automatically attracted advertising.

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The all-important question, then, is: With so much news content available online and for free, why would millions of people pay subscription to The New York Times?

With hundreds of hours of video uploaded onto YouTube every single day, why would people pay a monthly subscription to Disney + or Netflix?

With music available on hundreds of MP3 streaming sites, what explains millions of people paying a monthly subscription to Spotify for the same music?

And why is it that with all the roadside kiosks in Bugolobi, Kabalagala, and Wandegeya that sell tasty chicken, sausages and chips, many people flock to Café Javas and KFC where the same fast food is priced at an average of three times higher than what’s sold by the roadside?
In this lie clues into the future of print newspapers.
Quality matters. Value addition matters. An overall experience matters.
People are willing to pay a premium if they believe a product or service is of a high quality or comes with an air of prestige attached to it.
A glance through any Ugandan, Kenyan or Tanzanian print or online newspaper shows that quality is not the first thing that comes to mind; quality of photography, grammar, spelling, news sourcing, and diversity of content.

News and information are still important to most people.
If anything, the Internet and social media in particular have unwittingly caused the biggest explosion in reading, writing and video viewing in history.

Because every smartphone now has a camera and every social media account has made everyone a publisher and reporter, the global media industry has expanded so massively over the past 15 years that everyone, from every walk of life and career is now, in a sense, a journalist.

Even on social media sites like WhatsApp, Twitter and Facebook, the majority of original content and one that shapes public discussion, is from traditional broadcast TV and print newspapers.
The top two native-Ugandan websites by online traffic are Daily Monitor and New Vision.

The three industries or categories of people with the highest number of social media followers in Uganda are musicians, journalists, and politicians.
One of the sure ways to success in elective national or district politics, many journalists have discovered, is to leverage their high name recognition.

Therefore, far from being an irrelevant and fading industry, the news media not just in America and Europe but in Africa and Uganda too, is at the forefront not just in active use of the new digital technology but in the public’s perception of media personalities as opinion and information leaders.

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The key for Uganda’s media is to accept the new reality of digital publishing and distribution and, most crucially, to learn the all-important lesson from The New York Times and Netflix -- give people quality, credibility and the perceptive of an authoritative brand, and people will pay subscription.
But...it really has to be of a high image quality and highly relevant and engaging.
Focus 

The emergence of lifestyle and entertainment websites and apps such as Instagram and, over the last two years, TikTok, each with over one billion users, shows that the narrow focus by newspapers on presidents, parliaments, governments and elections was not a wise strategy.