Roy Greenslade on:

The future of newspapers: Popular newspapers, the mass newspapers, are dying and will die. They have got no future whatsoever. I think that serious newspapers have a longer life. I think they will die too, but in every society there will be perhaps one or two titles that will live on and they’ll be for relatively niche markets. Australia has The Financial Review, we have the FT – which has a very small market. The reason it will survive is because the people it sells to are rich enough to go on funding it. Right now it’s already an expensive newspaper and people buy it. People will go on buying perhaps one other title, a paper of record. I think that will live for a while, otherwise people will consume all of their news, and not just the news: comment, analysis, fun, trivia, whatever; they’ll consume that on the net.  

The trivialisation of online news: The Daily Telegraph is a very serious newspaper in Britain and yet when they did a story about the man who developed tree trunks for legs, it was for week on week it was the most visited story. The Daily Telegraph has six screens on its back wall which tell you the stories that are being accessed by people. Inevitably top of the list – on this very serious newspaper – it’s the less serious stories that are being accessed.  We can’t force people to be serious. We can’t force people, but that is one of the reasons that when newspapers start to die off it’s the more serious newspapers that will survive.  

How I feel about newspapers: I’m sad to see newspapers go. I worked on them for 40 years. I love the smell of them, the feel of them, the look of them. Still when I see a newspaper I’m tearing with my pen, saying that layout is crap, and that headline is nonsense and so on. So, I still love the newspaper format.  I think Tony O’Reilly [the owner of Independent News and Media] said it’s the ultimate browser and it is in a sense. One of the advantages of the newspaper is when I open it up I see things that I wouldn’t have normally read that interest me. That’s more difficult on the Web, because you now tend to follow the things that only interest you.  

The nuclear option: Saturday April 27 was the last edition of Wisconsin’s The Capital Times in its published form. It’s been published since 1917, a very nice broadsheet newspaper. It is now only going to be published on the Web, although they’ll produce one print edition a week, which will be a free sheet given away.  It wasn’t attracting enough readers and was losing its advertising. So, it’s decided to be web only. Now the Cap Times was a well-loved newspaper. Although loved not enough for enough people to buy it, notice. That nuclear option is going to occur in Britain I think very soon. It’ll be the regionals first. Our regionals are collapsing because regionals were more dependent on the most lucrative form of advertising, which was classifieds. The other problem is that all our regionals are owned by publicly created corporations,. These days shareholders are just thinking “Hey, once we had profit margins, we never got to 50 per cent, but once we got profit margins of 33 per cent, and now the margins are coming down to 20”. But, newspapers made vast profits on the back of journalism – and this is where I can be critical of employers – they did not necessarily plough those profits back into journalism. So, what’ve they done? Directly their profits have come down, they haven’t cut the advertising staff, because we want more advertising staff to get the little advertising there is. Let’s stick it to the journalists instead, and that’s the problem. We’re actually seeing that collapse going on.

Globalisation vs localism: I think also we are going to see two apparently contradictory things at the same time, one is globalisation and the other is localism. That is, that I think we will see the creation of local journalism, relatively small, much more involving of citizens, reporting on their community. But we are also going to see globalisation in the sense that we’re going to see at the moment: powerful brands, if I can use that awful word, like The Guardian, like The New York Times, like the Financial Times, where you’re seeing larger audiences outside their home base for those publications than you do at the moment. So, for instance we have more readers of The Guardian in the United States than we do in Britain on the Web. So, I think that powerful brands across the world could very well be the new emergence of journalism.   

Newspapers vs websites: I think if there is a disconnect between what you’re publishing on the Web and what you’re publishing in print you will fail.  You will ruin the brand. I spent a couple of days at the Financial Times, two different days, and what was so interesting in the talks that I had with staff there was the consistent talks about values. This is something also said at The Guardian. That is, if you don’t translate the value of your brand, of your core journalistic output in your newspaper currently, to the Web, then you will trash the brand and you will make enough mistakes. Some people think, by the way, that they should be complementary. Oh good, we can get away with a bit of trivia on the Web, we’ll do the serious stuff in the paper. Not so. Because if you’re going to be accessed by a different audience on the Web you also will not be doing a service in terms of attracting advertisers, who will ask “what audience are we getting here?”. So I think in both ways, in terms of your appeal to advertisers and your appeal to readers, you make a mistake if you don’t do the same thing or apply the same values to both platforms.