This year it’s all about the Sun. The return of Rebekah Brooks as News UK’s chief executive, a year after she was cleared of all charges related to the phone-hacking scandal, has seen a reinvigoration, not to mention a total strategic volte face, at the publisher.
With the Sun’s paywall recently dismantled, new editor Tony Gallagher now has the task of playing digital catchup and building an online giant to match the paper’s status as the UK’s biggest-selling daily newspaper.
“With popular journalism of that nature a paywall around the Sun was never going to work,” says Douglas McCabe, chief executive of Enders Analysis. “This year I think the Sun will be the most important model to watch, not just in the UK but globally. The Sun kind of invented social media [in print], but it never knew what to do about the internet. What is the Sun going to do now?”
Making a bid for global digital domination will be no mean feat: the Sun reported just under 25 million monthly browsers in November, the same level as in mid-2009 and about 10% of the equivalent figure for world leader Mail Online.
For the newspaper industry the good news is that 2016 isn’t shaping up to be quite as bad as the past 12 months. Group M puts the advertising decline in 2015 as the worst since the nadir of the recession in 2009. “This year will be less bad,” says McCabe, but “it will still be painful. It’s not bottoming out anytime soon … Print ads will continue to decline substantially.”
Key for newspapers will be convincing advertisers they offer a better way of reaching consumers than the scale-based strategies of companies such as Google and Facebook.
“The interesting question is about flight to quality, newspapers and magazines need to stand up and fight to say it is not just about reach and eyeballs,” says McCabe.
What’s also likely is that more “strong media franchises” will follow Bild-owner Axel Springer and financial freesheet CityAM in banning readers using adblockers. Adam Smith, futures director at Group M, says the threat posed by adblocking should encourage more responsible digital advertising.
“The root of the problem is advertisers who are unwelcome,” says Smith. “Advertising should be useful or beautiful as well as well-mannered.”
Expect more consolidation – Richard Desmond may well finally get an Express Newspapers deal off the ground and those Telegraph sale rumours haven’t gone away – or at least more collaboration between major and second tier newspaper groups.
