The Economist: More Media - Less News

Genom läsvärda Pontus Schultz blogg, chefredaktör för Veckans Affärer, hittade jag den här The Econimist-artikeln från april förra året om tidningsbranschen och våra välkända nordiska märken och där Schibsted hyllas som best practise. Spridda utdrag från artikeln

Even the most confident of newspaper bosses now agree that they will survive in the long term only if, like Schibsted, they can reinvent themselves on the internet and on other new-media platforms such as mobile phones and portable electronic devices.

“The biggest enemy of paid-for newspapers is time,” says Pelle Törnberg, Metro's chief executive.

"Most have been slow to grasp the changes affecting their industry—“remarkably, unaccountably complacent,” as Rupert Murdoch put it in a speech last year"

"The big problem is that readers online bring in nowhere near the revenues that print readers do. All but a handful of papers offer their content free online, so they immediately surrender the cover price of a print copy. People look at fewer pages online than they do in print, which makes web editions less valuable to advertisers."

"The secret of making money online, according to Schibsted, is not to rely on news aggregators like Google News and Yahoo!. Three-quarters of traffic to the websites for Schibsted's VG and Aftonbladet comes through their own home-pages and only a quarter from other websites. “If visitors come from Google to stories deep in the paper and then leave,” explains Mr Munck, “Google gets the dollars and we get only cents, but if we can bring them in through the front page we can charge €19,000 [$25,000] for a 24-hour banner ad.” In spite of this, most newspapers still depend on news aggregators."

"...This impression is exacerbated as papers seek to save money by sacking reporters and taking copy from agencies such as Reuters. "

“You won't be able to have many sacred cows...Newspaper companies will have to become more commercial,” says Henrik Poppe, a partner in McKinsey. Some leading titles, including the Wall Street Journal, have recently decided to put advertisements on the front page for the first time."

"The most shocking development for traditional newspapers has been the wild success of free dailies [...] In Europe they make up 16% of daily circulation. Metro calculates that it spends half the proportion of its total costs on editorial that paid-for papers do. In practice that means a freesheet with a circulation of about 100,000 employing 20 journalists, whereas a paid-for paper would have around 180."

Som sagt, läs artikeln här!

Vi märker annars hur Schibsted CEO Kjell Aamot (bilden vänster) kröntes till svensk internetkung i en ranking förra året och hur företagets 42%-iga marginaler och de djärva internetförvärven tydligen föranleder att man används som case på Harvard.

Nu är saker dock inte enbart frid och fröjd. Aftonbladets Tv7 läcker och är till salu... Pontus nämner även Punkt.se som ett kostsamt försök på en redan överetablerad vikande marknad. En spekulation från samma blogg är att Schibsted och den svenske VD:n Gunnar Strömblad skulle köpa Metro under hösten med punkt.se som påtrycksmedel...

Här är en norsk medieblogg, Kristine Lowe!

Vilken tycker ni förresten är bäst: Veckans Affärer (Bonniers) eller Affärsvärlden (Talentum)?