On crisis facing the media industry

Many among the younger age group of 18 to 24 have never bought or read a single print newspaper in all their lives or tuned in to an FM radio station.

Serious as that is, the problem is being compounded by the migration of brand advertising money – the lifeblood of the media – to the main online and social media platforms such as Twitter, Google, and Facebook.

Without readers and advertisers, print newspapers and magazines are staring death in the face.

Advertising and classified notices in previous times accounted for anything from two-thirds to three-quarters of radio, TV, and newspaper revenue.

The news reports and features, sports, crossword puzzles, and photos acted as fillers of space for newspapers.

The period up to 1993 in Uganda was one of scarcity, as it was in most African countries.

There was only one radio station in the country, Radio Uganda, one daily newspaper, barely any public libraries to talk of, no mobile phones, and no Internet.

By the time the first Internet cafes arrived in Uganda in 1999, the country was awash with FM radio stations, but it still had only three daily newspapers and a handful of TV stations.

The editorial staff did not have to put in much effort.

We just had to have two or three national daily newspapers in most countries and advertisers and readers had no choice but to go to these dailies.

Enter the second decade of the 2000s, and suddenly change was speeding up astronomically.

The first Ugandans on a little-known social media platform called Facebook signed up around 2006, and the first on another platform, Twitter, signed up in 2009.

Where the early Internet from 1995 to 2006 was still a top-down format of media personalities and brands broadcasting and publishing to audiences national and regional, social media changed everything.

For the first time, ordinary people moved from being passive recipients of content broadcast at them by traditional media to becoming their self-publishers by way, first of blogs, and then social media pages.

Newspapers now have to change their business model from dependency on advertisers to dependence on sales of print copies and paid subscriptions to their website content.

The good news in all this doom and gloom is that the consumption of informational content is now much higher than ever before.

Everywhere, from university campuses to wedding meetings, taxis, restaurants, office meetings, sitting rooms, bedrooms, at the hair salon, society is engrossed for most of its waking hours in online content.

Children as young as two or three can be seen scrolling through their parents’ smartphones.

If anything, the danger facing society today is not so much a lack of interest in information but an addiction to phone screens.

Even in Africa, notorious for its anemic reading and publishing culture, people are reading more than they have ever done.

“Reading”, in this context, includes casual scrolling through social media feeds to laugh at a post or photo caption, then resume scrolling downward, but at least they are reading-scrolling in much larger numbers than there ever have been.

Newspapers that once had limited city audiences are now national papers and often have substantial followings outside the country’s borders.

What’s more, everybody’s circle of friends or contacts has vastly increased.

The best-known politicians, musicians, sportsmen, media personalities, and consumer brands count followers in the millions.

Yet even at the lower end of the social pyramid, housemaids, boda boda riders, barbers, and market vendors who previously had a limited, local village or trading centre circle of acquaintances, now see follower numbers above 150 on average.

Never in human history has society been so connected and for most people, far beyond their immediate locality.

This period starting about 2009 is a golden age in information many times over, with society practically drowning in information of all kinds at the click of a mouse and, for most, the tap of a smartphone screen.

The challenge for publishers and creators is how to come up with relevant content for this huge and addicted audience and, most importantly, how to get them to pay a subscription for it.

Daily Monitor recently introduced a subscription paywall for its website online.

That’s the way to go, but it will require much more than this for the newspaper industry.

Because of the pervasive smartphone, the public now experiences news, information, and entertainment as one multi-media format.

Down their news feeds – every few minutes and seconds, every single day – flow photos, written posts, links to website articles, video clips, official press releases, and comments sections under posts.

Any content put behind a paywall will have to feature the same mix of text, photos, and videos that consumers engage with daily on the large social media platforms Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and so forth.

Given this, newspaper content should also evolve to reflect the new, standard multi-media format.

It’s crucial to note that the audience numbers for traditional media are falling in their traditional format.

So while a daily newspaper is seeing its print circulation fall, its online readership is growing every year.

The format, not the content, is the problem.

Publishing only written articles and features in the old print-era format and putting that behind a paywall won’t appeal much to a public used to multi-media content, and this is one of the reasons print magazines and newspapers are struggling.

Editors and publishers can’t seem to see that people accustomed to the variety of formats on social media will not settle for text-only, articles-only media.

In the early days of websites in the late 1990s, what newspapers did was simply post the content for the print edition onto their websites, maintaining almost the same layout.

This outlook has not changed over the last 25 years and the risk with putting content behind paywalls is that publishers and editors still stuck in the old print era will do the same and expect audiences to pay for this.

This might be the third or fourth time in the last three years that I write about the existential crisis facing the news media, especially print newspapers.

It will need an urgent, board-level, coordinated industry effort by multiple media houses for this to work.

This is not to lobby for a personal seat on the Monitor board of directors, but today’s boards and management teams simply must have, at a minimum, at least three-quarters of people well-versed in the latest in digital technology, social media consumer trends, and Silicon Valley digital devices.

So, before the media blames social media for taking traditional media’s audiences and circulation and advertising revenue, we must acknowledge that the problem for the media runs much deeper and is mainly rooted in the in-house mentality.

Good news
The good news in all this doom and gloom is that the consumption of informational content is now much higher than ever before.

Everywhere, from university campuses to wedding meetings, taxis, restaurants, office meetings, sitting rooms, bedrooms, at the hair salon, society is engrossed for most of its waking hours in online content.
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