Media buyers deem newspapers yesterday’s news. Yet Fairfax boss Greg Hywood said audiences are sky-high and people “can’t live” without them. The newspaper industry hopes new readership numbers "fix that distorted perception".
Speaking on Monday at the launch of EMMA, the industry-backed readership metric, Hywood said that Australia has “never been more engaged in journalism” and the content that newspapers deliver.
Newspapers connect with entire communities and people throughout their lives, he said, but their value [in the ad budget pecking order] has “been distorted”. The EMMA readership metric fixes that, he said.
Initial numbers issued by the publishing industry-funded survey have suggested more people read newspapers than previously assumed. They also break down by section which parts people are reading and whether they are reading them in print, online or via handhelds.
Hywood suggested that the data lifts publishing out of the dark ages and cures the “infection” of being defined by a 500-year old medium.
“We’ve never had a bigger audience. Because we have been so aggressive in Australia in getting journalism and content online – way more successful than the US and the UK – we have a larger audience than ever,” Hywood said.
People visit news sites, said Hywood, because they want to find out what’s happening - and always will. Now that the new numbers suggested audiences were higher, he said it was up to media buyers to put their money where their mouths are and use the tools they had long requested.
“People don’t just [visit news sites] because they have nothing else to do. They come into what we do because this is an Australian community that has never been more engaged in journalism and the content we deliver. The beauty of that is, for the first time, we’ve really measured that. Now we can deliver it for industry. Industry wanted that, and we’ve done it.”
The variable now is whether the new numbers will stop or at least slow the decline in newspaper ad dollars, which continued to drop by about a fifth year-on-year. Hywood speculated that the reason for such sustained decline was news media being pigeon-holed by buyers as being old hat.
“The newspaper industry has been too much defined by the nature what we produce, not by the content that we deliver. The fact is we connect with the entire community. All through various stages of their lives, and do it through different technologies."
EMMA data allowed publishers to remind buyers not to “define what we do by the technology of something invented 500 years ago.”
That perception has “infected the notion of what we do”, Hywood said, which was “delivering something that people can’t live without”.
“People want to know what is going on with their community. It doesn’t matter if it is Tamworth or Dubbo, Sydney or Melbourne. People read the context of their lives, the context in which they are living.”
The demand for that was “endless” he said, yet, there had “been a distortion" in the way that newspapers are perceived.
"This fixes it."
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