The internet era has not been kind to newspaper publishers. It has almost killed classified advertising, accelerated a decline in circulation and directed eyeballs towards a seemingly infinite supply of blogs, videos and websites.
But after more than a decade of struggling to keep up with disruptive technology, a glimmer of hope has brightened the pervading gloom in the industry. And with that hope comes the very source of so many of its woes: Silicon Valley.
Apple
and Facebook
have announced news services that could potentially create an important revenue stream for publishers, broaden their readership and — eventually — offer them a direct path to paying subscribers.
Facebook has enlisted nine publishers for its Instant Articles services, which has already launched in limited form in the US with content from BuzzFeed, The Atlantic and The New York Times. (It plans to start the service in Europe soon.) Apple, meanwhile, has signed up dozens of publishers for Apple News — a Flipboard-style app which launches in the autumn — including The New York Times, The Guardian, The Economist and the Financial Times.
Given the industry’s bruising experiences, it is perhaps natural that publishers have greeted the new services with a mixture of fear and optimism. Mark Thompson, chief executive of The New York Times, points to the benefits of being able provide its news content to a vast new audience. “We’re talking about an opportunity to distribute your content at no charge at all to well over 1bn people,” he says. “[Facebook] has a larger population than the People’s Republic of China.”
But there are concerns that Apple News and Facebook Instant Articles — which are not paying for the content — will chip away at the notion of a newspaper or magazine website as a standalone brand to be digested whole, rather than broken up into individual stories and scattered across different apps. The services could “dilute [publisher] brands as destination sites and . . . boost the platform brand”, says Gordon Crovitz, a media adviser and former publisher of the Wall Street Journal.
Publishers have also privately voiced concerns about the power Apple and Facebook will wield and the potential harm the new aggregation services could cause to paid subscription models. Apple has told publishers its service will eventually include subscription capability and, like Facebook, has told them they will be able to keep all the advertising revenue they generate. But neither company has ruled out changing this arrangement in the future.