Two years ago the newspaper industry started to suffer more than most due to rapid drop in advertising revenues, however this was not only an issue that newspapers have had to deal with virtually every type of media organisation had to make substantial cut-backs of one kind or another to counter-act the problems caused by the financial crisis. But is it really the financial crisis that has caused this massive decline in ad-revenues or has something been wrong with the industry for longer than they realise?

The most important change has been end users who have finally become media aware, the user understanding of information and its delivery has had to become more complex due to the many ways in which we live our lives, keep in touch with our friends and keep abreast of what is happening in our world. There was a day when newspapers were the only dedicated way of getting quality reliable news coverage, or information about friends, but as we all know too well those days are long gone, radio, print, and increasingly the web now flood the markets that newspapers once owned each taking a slice of the pie which obviously cannot sustain them all.

So as the users have become smarter the companies that serve them have made mistakes, the main problem that I have seen within the local newspaper trade has been the decrease in senior positions being held by skilled employees from across all disciplines of a company and too many being held by commercially driven personel. When my career began many Managing Directors were Ex-Editors, production staff would have a place in the hierachy along side commercial people, all these things helped bring balance within the business giving both good quality execution of their product while at the same time looking at the commercial benefits. What we see now is the single minded pursuit of money with no knowledgable concern about the quality of what is produced, granted Editorial standards are traditionally high but in recent times production costs have been slashed which has caused a massive decline in the quality of editorial and advertising while commercial teams grew from strength to strength, which has proved to be at the detriment of the products they serve.

The frantic chase of the cash has made these businesses lose site of what they are there for. Instead of keeping prices reasonable over the years basic greed in standard cost increases both in cover price and advertising rates has priced most newspapers out of a now extremely competitive advertising market, particularly since web advertising started to take hold. Newspaper and Radio now have to compete with a business model that suddenly doesn’t have the same overheads as they do or the same restriction which means the web industry is just more robust and able to cope with dramatically slumping markets in this modern time.

Obviously we have seen both print and radio try and move towards online offerings and in most cases unsuccessfully; I can’t say that my company has made a slick transition, we are just lucky we have a few commited skilled people that have made it their focus to make this work, we are however seeing very different results at the vast majority of other titles. This lack of success is again down to the lack of skilled individuals that can guide a company through this troubled transition. Any new product needs to be user focussed first while any commercial gain should be seen as the natural result of that great product. Google and Yahoo are prime examples of how getting the product right will lead to natural revenue; their focus wasn’t always money!.

Ultimately the shift in power within the media industry from production to a commercial drive is what has killed it, but this hasn’t happened overnight it has been happening for more than 20 years; the skewed focus within a user based industry has forced a change and potentially the death of some really important institutions the world over and I believe that these institutions are too far gone to make the changes necessary for sustained survival in the new media world. I predicted ten years ago that this would happen long before the business I worked for had a website worth visiting, unsurprisingly my predications were met with scepticism by some of the very same people that now lead the way.