The recession claimed another victim today when News International said that it planned to close its afternoon freesheet, TheLondonPaper. The title was launched nearly three years ago in a blaze of publicity as the freesheet went head-to-head with London Lite. News International have cited the downturn in advertising and the resulting huge losses as being the key cause of the paper’s demise.

This follows news earlier in the month that Rupert Murdoch, the owner of News International, plans to introduce charges for access to all his news websites, including The Times, The Sun and the News of the World, by next summer. Once again, the motivation behind this move is to compensate for the losses that have come about as the advertising industry has been stung by the recession. If the charges are introduced and prove to be successful, is it just a matter of time before other online news sites follow suit?

FT editor Lionel Barber has predicted that “almost all” news organisations will charge for online content within a year. However, many seem to disagree. Roy Greenslade spoke to Channel 4 News and argued that sites like FT.com can charge for online content because it is targeting a niche audience. Sites dealing with general news would struggle to sustain charges when websites like the BBC are available for free.

From the perspectives of the PR and PR measurement industries, the key learning to take away from the news of TheLondonPaper’s closing, and Mr Murdoch’s plan to charge for newspaper sites, is that the advertising industry is no longer the cash cow it once was. Further to this, the recession has had a big impact not just on advertising rates, but circulation figures too – recent ABC figures have shown that consumer magazines in particular have been badly hit.

At Metrica, we have never been fond of Advertising Value Equivalent (AVE) and Opportunities To See (OTS) as methods of measuring PR success, and the current economic climate further hammers home the point that these measures are flawed. AVE and OTS figures are falling across the board, so even if a 2009 campaign generates more articles in higher profile publications, results could still pale in comparison with 2008 and 2007 data when rates were higher. 

So, what are the alternatives? There are a range of useful methods for demonstrating Return On Investment (ROI), and these have been discussed recently on Measurement Matters. In a six-part series of blogs discussing methods for demonstrating PR ROI, there is plenty of food for thought.

With newspaper readerships in decline and a recession in tow, the pressure on journalists at all levels will only increase. Fewer staff and the demand on those remaining to produce ever more copy, according to some, threatens the editorial integrity of journalism.

According to Greenslade this not only threatens to reduce the integrity of journalism, but also the accountability of local government as regional newspapers play an integral role in holding local politicians to account.

This could manifest itself with under-pressure journalists at regional titles publishing articles based on press releases without fully validating the newsworthiness of the issue.

However, just because media content is often generated by PR doesn’t mean it is dishonest. Beth McLoughlin, News Editor at Now Magazine comments that “just because a story is generated by someone with an agenda doesn’t mean that it isn’t worthwhile, or that with the right checks, can’t have journalistic integrity by the time it is published.”

If a political party tries to sell in a story criticising a rival party to a regional newspaper, it clearly has a biased agenda. That does not mean the facts they quote are untrue and nor does it strip the story of value.

I’m sure freesheets will continue to be part of the fabric of our local communities. There is still a demand for what Greenslade calls “commercial rather than journalistic products.” People will still want to know about local news or to find local handymen. All newspapers are commercial operations - that is why the Mail on Sunday gives out free DVDs or The Guardian has given away scores of wall charts. The business model of all newspapers requires them to raise revenue from advertising.

Greenslade’s Evening Standard article which covered our Metrica Numbers research last year quoted Yell’s Susannah Finn as saying: “We may see the occasional case of lazy journalism but for the most part the press is simply working under the pressure of too little time.”

Likewise an article in The Independent covered the emergent “haste and paste” trend identified by Metrica Numbers: “High message delivery and spokespeople mentions suggest the emergence of a copy and paste publishing trend in online media” – Greenslade suggests that this culture has been prevalent in local freesheets.

I will be interested to note from our ongoing research whether the recession means our clients are more able to get their messages across than previously. If newspapers cut back on journalist numbers, those left behind will be under even more pressure to fall into “haste and paste.”

A recent Pew Research Center for The People & The Press survey of US adults indicates what we all see in ourselves and our media habits... as our thumbs develop calluses from our cellpmobile phones.  Acccording to Pew, 40 percent of Americans obtain their national and international news from the Internet.  The Internet as a news source has surged 16 percent from 2007 - 2008 alone.  For adults younger than 30 years, 59% of them source their news online, the same percentage as for television.  This is a massive shift in a year, since in 2007, 34% of those under 30 sourced their news online and 68% sourced their news from television.  Cell phones/mobiles are mainstreaming our news, as the BBC's Richard Titus mentions in his blog. 

Such figures below also provide more for those such as Roy Greenslade who challenge traditional media to engage differently with the 'restless remote' generation.  In 2010, what do you think the below  BBC (2008) diagram will look like?  Will newspapers have healthier business models through new forms of engagement, content and conversations?  Or, will we, as newspaper audiences, be on the receiving end of lowered credibility and innovation due to commercial pressures and rising cover prices?   How, and to what extent, will the social fabric of our personal consumption of news shift further as print-centric newspapers lose their traction in our daily lives? 

As the BBC diagram reveals, newspapers are not very visible in this survey of how Britons use on-demand media in their daily lives.  Newspapers need to quickly insert themselves into the social fabrics of our lives in new ways and leverage their historical role in how we learn about ourselves, our institutions and the world.   How do you think newspapers can play a more constant news intake role than just in the morning, as noted in the below diagram?

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/img/BBCUXD_user_ecosystem04.jpg

There have been a couple of interesting blog posts from Roy Greenslade, one of the UK's most respected media commentators recently.  Roy was the recent keynote speaker at the International Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communications' annual awards dinner.  (AMEC is the industry trade body that represents Metrica and the other leading firms that specialise in PR measurement and media evaluation.)  His speech that night was fantastic; the content was reported on Measurement Matters at the time by my colleague Paul Kennedy.

Writing in his Guardian blog, Roy began the year by predicting that 'online is the future and the future is now.' 

He made a series of predictions for the year that included:

• at least one major regional owner will go under
• many local publications will close or merge
• more freely distributed papers will cease to publish
• and many more journalists will lose their jobs

He believes that the traditional newspaper industry faces a 'perfect storm' which is resulting in there being limited money available for much needed innovation in new forms of journalism and online delivery platforms.  And owing to commercial pressures, too many of the national paper websites are seeking ratings at the expense of innovation & credibility.  This in turn is going to make it more difficult for them to generate the online audiences that they so desperately need.

This week he has posted again commenting on the business folly being exhibited by many papers as they have set about increasing their cover price.  The Mirror, Guardian, Observer, and News of the World have all done this recently and he concludes that all this will achieve is the acceleration of the decline in their audiences. 

We may well now be in January and memories of the holiday season starting to fade, but does anyone else think that the newspaper publishers' actions are somewhat reminiscent of a turkey voting for Christmas?

Echoing the results of question 1, no participant believes regional papers will be online only within the next two years either. However, only a third of respondents believe we will always have a print version of regional papers. Almost a third expect regional papers to go online only within five years reflecting the dire financial predicament regional publishers currently face. 

The thrid question asked where people expect to source their news in the future. Almost two-thirds of Measurement Matters readers still expect to use established media brands, like the BBC and Wall St journal, to receive their news. These big media providers have a strong position to work from and how they continue to develop and integrate their brand with online and mobile technologies will be crucial to their future success or failure.   

This poll has now closed but you can continue to take part in the future of news discussion through Paul Hender's new post on News 2.0. 

Amid last night’s awards and celebrations, media commentator Roy Greenslade gave a fantastic keynote speech which balanced nostalgia for print journalism with the realities of a modern media world: “Even those of us with print in our veins” must recognise that newspapers are doomed, as print is a “dying business model”. While the basic premise of the speech was simple – that newspapers are a dying medium – the speech drew on many wider issues to support its conclusion. 

 The current economic climate can only expedite rigor mortis in the industry with revenue streams drying up at an alarming rate. As Greenslade, rather bluntly, put it: “[Visual advertising] has gone off a cliff in the last six weeks”. 

With the growth of citizen journalism and interactive media channels we are currently in a “transition” period. Traditionally top down news reporting, for example, is being challenged by the growing force of bottom-up citizen journalism. No longer do we (the audience, the citizens) passively accept those accounts fed to us by publishers but, enabled by technology, we choose to publish our own accounts ourselves. This ‘new media’ is eroding the “mini-god-like status” the press formerly held. 

Significantly, Greenslade did not stop with his frank assessment of the status quo, but went beyond to illustrate two ways in which news brands can adapt and thrive in the modern world where everyone is, or can be, a journalist.

First he spoke about ProPublica – the philanthropically funded, non-profit newsroom – which describes itself as providing ‘journalism in the public interest’ or, as Greenslade put it, writing stories “of moral force”. Notable is the fact that newspapers can use resources like this to offset overheads in the face of lower revenues. 

Each story we publish will be distributed in a manner designed to maximize its impact. At the outset, at least, that means that many of our “deep dive” stories will likely be offered exclusively to a traditional news organization, free of charge, for publication or broadcast.

The second is Spot.Us, which allows people to promote stories they deem important. Like ProPublica, Spot.Us is funded through public donations allowing a small pool of journalists to generate news which can be used across the media world.

Spot.Us is a non-profit project of the Center for Media Change. We are an open source project, to pioneer “community funded reporting.” Through Spot.Us the public can commission journalists to do investigations on important and perhaps overlooked stories. All donations are tax deductible and if a news organization buys exclusive rights to the content, your donation will be reimbursed.

These sites outlined are excellent examples of how bottom-up journalism can be effectively leveraged to have a positive impact on publisher’s bottom lines.

In conclusion, Greenslade very simply stated: “New media is the future”. The challenge for us all is to find new and better ways to use it.

  *Photograph of Roy Greensldae by Johnny Greig (http://gallery.johnnygreig.com/)