Adiós to the newspaper…
I was contacted last week by Digiday’s Lucinda Southern regarding the announcement by El País, Spain’s leading daily, a few months ago that it was preparing, over time, to abandon its print edition and go fully digital. The story is entitled “El Pais hones its online editorial strategy” (pdf).
We talked about Spanish newspapers, and how El País has consistently been behind the pack in internet innovation, afraid of cannibalizing its print edition, about the development of ad-blockers and advertising in general, about how the sector is changing, as well as about how new, purely digital, competitors are appearing, and of course my involvement in El Español, which has just won a prize for its website (link in Spanish), and about formats such as branded content, which continues to show considerable potential to be much more than simply a collection of advertorials.
Are the newspaper’s days over? In the case of Spain it won’t be for people like me trying to get the message over for most of the last two decades. I wrote my thesis about how the digital era would impact on newspapers back in 1996. It’s been pretty obvious for some time now that virtually nobody under the age of 30 wants to read yesterday’s news when by checking their smartphone, computer, or pad, they can find out what is going on right now and click on the links to get additional information. The piles of unread dailies where I teach — or even in the entrance at the School of Journalism — testify to that. That said, when they hand out free newspapers aboard Spain’s AVE high-speed train, I always take one: it serves as a useful table cloth to put on top of my laptop and eat my lunch. And if I take any newspaper home from work, it’s because I’m doing a bit of painting and decorating.
That’s all newspapers are good for these days, unless you’re a hopeless romantic who still thinks they’re more comfortable to read.
The reason El País has finally caught up is that it faces extinction otherwise. There is a clear generation divide between ageing readers of print and paper editions. As that older generation becomes older, print will disappear.
And what awaits El País in the fully digital era? The internet is a complex environment, a difficult one to survive in, and one where advertising is still largely limited to intrusive formats, which is driving more and more people to install ad-blockers, and in which paywalls only work for publications offering really specialist knowledge, and in which we find our news from an increasing array of places: Apple News, Google Newsstand, Snapchat Discover or Facebook Instant Articles, where we are oriented by social recommendation and where we probably don’t even remember the name of the site the story came from.
Making money in this kind of highly competitive environment is not easy and requires above all an inclusive mentality, open to all kinds of change and a willingness to experiment, rather than hanging on to practices that worked in the past. Sadly, I have to say I haven’t come across such a mindset in many Spanish newspapers to date. In short, the internet is the only game in town, and contrary to what some doomsayers believe, it’s not such a bad place.
Bidding farewell to paper is simply accepting that a technology dating back thousands of years is giving way to one that is intrinsically superior. Refusing to accept this is a waste of time. When El País finally affirms that it is abandoning its print edition, all that is happening is that it has finally reached the unavoidable conclusion that the digital revolution is in full flight and cannot be turned back: common sense, in other words. And bearing in mind the influence of that house of horrors the Spanish Newspaper Publisher’s Association (AEDE) has exercised over recent years, one can only take one’s hat off to the paper.
(En español, aquí)
