The future of newspapers: owners seek safety in numbers

The outlook for print advertising has gone from bad to worse. Print newspaper ad spending in the UK, for instance, is set to fall by £135m to £866m this year, even steeper than the £112m drop in 2015, says Enders Analysis. “These are big numbers,” says Douglas McCabe, an analyst at Enders. “This is not advertising that is going to come back.”

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Can Axel Springer do the ‘impossible’?

“The soul and spirit of the company Axel Springer is journalism. We serve our readers with independent and critical information and advice as well as good entertainment. Through our media offerings we are making a contribution to the strengthening of freedom and democracy. “

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Telegraph warns of ‘intense competition’ from Facebook and Google

The owner of The Daily Telegraph’s view of the trading environment in its newly published annual accounts was more bearish than a year ago. TMG described how print publishers now have a “less certain” role because of “competition from the proliferation of free digital content and the increasing role of large-scale digital platforms in distributing and aggregating content”, particularly on mobile

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Apple Allows Publishers To Sell Subs Inside News App

In the latest progress-with-caveats, Apple is allowing publishers to sell digital subscriptions from inside the Apple News app, giving them access to a much larger potential subscriber base. But that’s hedged around, as always, by constraints intended to maintain consumer privacy — and Apple’s control over access to them

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How daily newspapers can win after all

Flashes&Flames: Murdoch might cast envious eyes at the 129-year-old, family-owned Hearst Corporation which has built an unrivalled multi-media business, not least by investing widely in long-term partnerships and joint ventures. Last year, Hearst increased its revenue by 6% to almost $11bn in what was the fifth consecutive year of record revenue and profits. Its revenue […]

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News media move to ban ad blockers from websites

People using ad-blocking software who visited the The New York Times website in March were shown a message. This read: “The best things in life aren’t free”. It went on to explain that “advertising helps us fund our journalism” and gave the visitor two options to read the newspaper’s online content: disable their ad-blocking software or pay for a subscription

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Vice to launch in more than 50 new countries

Vice is to launch TV and digital services in more than 50 countries, as the youth-focused media company continues to expand aggressively. It has struck a range of deals with international media partners to bring TV, mobile and digital services to regions including the Middle East, Africa, India and south-east Asia. Vice will also extend its […]

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Trinity Mirror lessons for newspapers everywhere

It’s been another ‘bad news’ month for UK newspapers. Just a few weeks after Vice founder Shane Smith predicted a media industry “bloodbath”, Britain’s most successful newspaper group DMGT reported a 16% drop in advertising revenue at the Daily Mail in the six months to the end of March. Even the 20% growth at its Mail Online was scant consolation because annual revenue will not reach the £100m targeted for more than two years. Consequently, the world’s largest English language newspaper site remains far from profitable. Daily sales of the UK’s national newspapers have more than halved to 6.5m in the past 15 years and are still falling. But it is the continuing drain of advertising that panics investors.

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Suddenly, national newspapers are heading for that print cliff fall

I am in Ireland to address the Irish Press Council’s annual general meeting in a lecture entitled “Have newspapers got a future?” My theme is that they have no future. Declining circulation figures tell us that people are switching week by week from print to screen. It is simply a matter of time before it becomes unprofitable to continue publishing newsprint papers

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Fleet Street is being sunk by the internet

Shares in Daily Mail and General Trust, publisher of the Daily Mail, fell by 10 per centon Thursday as it disclosed the toll that the sudden downturn in print advertising is having on its business. It suffered a 16 per cent decline in print advertising revenues in the first half of its financial year

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What next for the ‘new’ Bauer Media?

Media everywhere needs to be focused on unbundling information that was once packaged for print, in order to give readers-users the opportunity to pay only for what they actually want. Nowhere is this easier than in markets where readers account for most of the revenues – like many of those sectors traditionally dominated by Bauer

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