Evening Standard: Can MySpace make The Sun shine again?
By David Rowan
The Sun's three gongs at Monday's British Press Awards gave its journalists a much-needed chance to breathe out in a year remembered more for falling circulation, a daunting series of lawsuits, and the editor's own unfortunate stay in a Battersea police cell. But amid the celebrations for winning reporter, showbusiness writer and front page of the year, some bigger questions have been drifting around Wapping. With Rupert Murdoch having last week questioned the role of newspapers in his "new age of discovery", how would The Sun reinvent itself as "content" in his MySpace-driven world? And if the print edition continued in its seemingly inexorable decline, how long before the proprietor eventually decided it was no longer viable?
It is not just The Sun that faces falling sales. The red-tops as a sector have struggled to keep readers, their DVD giveaways and travel promotions only temporarily halting the decline. The People's circulation has fallen in a decade from 2.1 million to below 900,000, the Mirror's from 2.5 million to less than 1.7 million. But as Britain's biggest-selling daily newspaper, The Sun has the most to lose from a trend that, from more than four million sales in 1995, has taken it to barely above three million.
In fact, excluding foreign sales, its audited February circulation was down to 2,999,642 - and 367,083 of those were bought at a discount. And, having fought an expensive cover-price war with the Mirror four years ago, Murdoch - to judge by comments he made during his visit to London - appears in no mood to cut The Sun's price again to stimulate demand.
Faced with declining advertising and circulation revenue, Rebekah Wade, the editor, is having to impose some of the largest budget and staff cuts in recent memory. "The market is changing," she warned staff last summer when announcing £2 million of cuts that included around 20 redundancies. "We must respond to new challenges from online media, the rise of freesheets, and a market that is putting pressure on our advertising revenue. In short, we must adapt if we want to stay ahead." Earlier this month, after a budget freeze attributed to higher newsprint costs and a continually weak ad market, Wade informed staff that she personally must henceforth pre-approve expenses ranging from foreign travel to flowers for unwell contacts.
Editorially, too, The Sun has come under immense competitive pressure, not least from the Daily Mail, which poached its star columnist, Richard Littlejohn - whom Wade has struggled to replace - and has strengthened coverage of celebrity stories that she would once have presumed hers. The paper's poor relationship with some Premiership footballers - including legal battles with Wayne Rooney and Ashley Cole - may also have cost it valuable access. Some critics have gone further, suggesting that The Sun currently lacks a strong identity.
This is the context in which Murdoch last week rekindled his romance with online publishing. "A new generation of media consumers has risen demanding content delivered when they want it, how they want it, and very much as they want it," the News Corporation chairman declared in his London speech. "Newspapers must give readers a choice of accessing their journalism in the pages of the paper or on websites [or] on any platform that appeals to them." The Sun, meanwhile, would need to build a new online identity within his MySpace social networking site, in what it is suggested will be called the "MySun" readers' network.
Stuart Higgins, a former editor of The Sun who now runs his own PR business, accepts the logic of needing to move beyond the print product. "The point is that youngsters are growing up with the internet rather than newspapers," he says. "They're getting their information from sources other than papers. That's the big difference."
Bill Hagerty, formerly editor of The People and now of the British Journalism Review, agrees. "I don't think the red-tops will disappear, certainly not The Sun, but they are diminishing and they've got to harness the web to keep up profitability," he says. "The Sun makes a lot of money, but you can see that profit is going to diminish. The New York Times has shown you can make money on the web, so it can be done. It's essential."
But according to some City analysts who track the newspaper industry, the decline cannot simply be blamed on the net. "Even before the internet was established, things weren't looking healthy in terms of how far the newspaper-reading habit was being formed among younger age groups," an analyst at a leading bank says. "There's more truth than we'd like to believe in Murdoch's line about no one under 30 having looked at a classified newspaper ad. Things are pretty bleak. Does it make sense to have three daily and four Sunday red-tops? Probably not."
The assessment of Andrew Neil, former editor of Murdoch's Sunday Times, is equally brutal. "The red-tops are the steel mills and the coal mines of today," Neil says. "They are in inexorable decline, and Murdoch knows that. That is why, after circulation falls like it has, editors are not being fired left, right and centre. Murdoch knows this is a long-term secular decline."
Some Sun executives are convinced that Murdoch is still prepared to invest heavily in expanding the printed product, which remains highly profitable, to cement its competitive advantage. They point to the hiring last autumn of Mike Anderson, the former Evening Standard managing director, who was involved with the launch of Standard Lite, as a sign that the paper was considering adding to its print formats, perhaps with a free or an afternoon edition. Anderson did not return phone calls and nobody from The Sun would comment on its editorial or commercial strategy.
What is clear is that Murdoch, after many false starts, is now prepared to commit large sums to an online strategy. He spent $580 million to acquire MySpace as part of a wider deal, which currently gives him access to 60 million registered users aged 16 to 34 - "the 'My Space generation'," as he calls them, "talking to itself in a world without frontiers". Yet it is difficult to tell where The Sun will fit in to the defiantly independent, non-corporate culture of MySpace, which has already attracted fake registrations in the name of Rupert Murdoch (one of which has him proclaiming the "many important benefits of fascism").
"The MySpace thing is just another example of the dinosaurs thrashing out, desperately trying to do something that will lift their share prices," Andrew Neil believes. "They've rushed in to incredibly expensive and frankly barmy acquisitions - and it ain't just Rupe the Duke, it's NBC Universal, and ITV. All they're doing is paying incredibly inflated prices [to send a signal to the market] for things they'll probably never get their money back on."
Murdoch understands this, Neil suggests, just as he knows that the real threat to red-top sales is not the internet but the growth of multichannel television. "It's an old maxim of his that wherever the number of TV channels explodes, the sale of red-top newspapers declines," he says. "Just think what British TV was like 20 years ago - there were no topless pictures, very little sport or celebrity or gossip. People bought the redtops because it gave them things that TV didn't give them. Now TV is awash with them."
And if that's the case, then Murdoch - who, after all, shook up the cosy broadcasting establishment by launching Sky - has no one to blame but himself.
(Evening Standard, March 22 2006)
The Sun's three gongs at Monday's British Press Awards gave its journalists a much-needed chance to breathe out in a year remembered more for falling circulation, a daunting series of lawsuits, and the editor's own unfortunate stay in a Battersea police cell. But amid the celebrations for winning reporter, showbusiness writer and front page of the year, some bigger questions have been drifting around Wapping. With Rupert Murdoch having last week questioned the role of newspapers in his "new age of discovery", how would The Sun reinvent itself as "content" in his MySpace-driven world? And if the print edition continued in its seemingly inexorable decline, how long before the proprietor eventually decided it was no longer viable?
It is not just The Sun that faces falling sales. The red-tops as a sector have struggled to keep readers, their DVD giveaways and travel promotions only temporarily halting the decline. The People's circulation has fallen in a decade from 2.1 million to below 900,000, the Mirror's from 2.5 million to less than 1.7 million. But as Britain's biggest-selling daily newspaper, The Sun has the most to lose from a trend that, from more than four million sales in 1995, has taken it to barely above three million.
In fact, excluding foreign sales, its audited February circulation was down to 2,999,642 - and 367,083 of those were bought at a discount. And, having fought an expensive cover-price war with the Mirror four years ago, Murdoch - to judge by comments he made during his visit to London - appears in no mood to cut The Sun's price again to stimulate demand.
Faced with declining advertising and circulation revenue, Rebekah Wade, the editor, is having to impose some of the largest budget and staff cuts in recent memory. "The market is changing," she warned staff last summer when announcing £2 million of cuts that included around 20 redundancies. "We must respond to new challenges from online media, the rise of freesheets, and a market that is putting pressure on our advertising revenue. In short, we must adapt if we want to stay ahead." Earlier this month, after a budget freeze attributed to higher newsprint costs and a continually weak ad market, Wade informed staff that she personally must henceforth pre-approve expenses ranging from foreign travel to flowers for unwell contacts.
Editorially, too, The Sun has come under immense competitive pressure, not least from the Daily Mail, which poached its star columnist, Richard Littlejohn - whom Wade has struggled to replace - and has strengthened coverage of celebrity stories that she would once have presumed hers. The paper's poor relationship with some Premiership footballers - including legal battles with Wayne Rooney and Ashley Cole - may also have cost it valuable access. Some critics have gone further, suggesting that The Sun currently lacks a strong identity.
This is the context in which Murdoch last week rekindled his romance with online publishing. "A new generation of media consumers has risen demanding content delivered when they want it, how they want it, and very much as they want it," the News Corporation chairman declared in his London speech. "Newspapers must give readers a choice of accessing their journalism in the pages of the paper or on websites [or] on any platform that appeals to them." The Sun, meanwhile, would need to build a new online identity within his MySpace social networking site, in what it is suggested will be called the "MySun" readers' network.
Stuart Higgins, a former editor of The Sun who now runs his own PR business, accepts the logic of needing to move beyond the print product. "The point is that youngsters are growing up with the internet rather than newspapers," he says. "They're getting their information from sources other than papers. That's the big difference."
Bill Hagerty, formerly editor of The People and now of the British Journalism Review, agrees. "I don't think the red-tops will disappear, certainly not The Sun, but they are diminishing and they've got to harness the web to keep up profitability," he says. "The Sun makes a lot of money, but you can see that profit is going to diminish. The New York Times has shown you can make money on the web, so it can be done. It's essential."
But according to some City analysts who track the newspaper industry, the decline cannot simply be blamed on the net. "Even before the internet was established, things weren't looking healthy in terms of how far the newspaper-reading habit was being formed among younger age groups," an analyst at a leading bank says. "There's more truth than we'd like to believe in Murdoch's line about no one under 30 having looked at a classified newspaper ad. Things are pretty bleak. Does it make sense to have three daily and four Sunday red-tops? Probably not."
The assessment of Andrew Neil, former editor of Murdoch's Sunday Times, is equally brutal. "The red-tops are the steel mills and the coal mines of today," Neil says. "They are in inexorable decline, and Murdoch knows that. That is why, after circulation falls like it has, editors are not being fired left, right and centre. Murdoch knows this is a long-term secular decline."
Some Sun executives are convinced that Murdoch is still prepared to invest heavily in expanding the printed product, which remains highly profitable, to cement its competitive advantage. They point to the hiring last autumn of Mike Anderson, the former Evening Standard managing director, who was involved with the launch of Standard Lite, as a sign that the paper was considering adding to its print formats, perhaps with a free or an afternoon edition. Anderson did not return phone calls and nobody from The Sun would comment on its editorial or commercial strategy.
What is clear is that Murdoch, after many false starts, is now prepared to commit large sums to an online strategy. He spent $580 million to acquire MySpace as part of a wider deal, which currently gives him access to 60 million registered users aged 16 to 34 - "the 'My Space generation'," as he calls them, "talking to itself in a world without frontiers". Yet it is difficult to tell where The Sun will fit in to the defiantly independent, non-corporate culture of MySpace, which has already attracted fake registrations in the name of Rupert Murdoch (one of which has him proclaiming the "many important benefits of fascism").
"The MySpace thing is just another example of the dinosaurs thrashing out, desperately trying to do something that will lift their share prices," Andrew Neil believes. "They've rushed in to incredibly expensive and frankly barmy acquisitions - and it ain't just Rupe the Duke, it's NBC Universal, and ITV. All they're doing is paying incredibly inflated prices [to send a signal to the market] for things they'll probably never get their money back on."
Murdoch understands this, Neil suggests, just as he knows that the real threat to red-top sales is not the internet but the growth of multichannel television. "It's an old maxim of his that wherever the number of TV channels explodes, the sale of red-top newspapers declines," he says. "Just think what British TV was like 20 years ago - there were no topless pictures, very little sport or celebrity or gossip. People bought the redtops because it gave them things that TV didn't give them. Now TV is awash with them."
And if that's the case, then Murdoch - who, after all, shook up the cosy broadcasting establishment by launching Sky - has no one to blame but himself.
(Evening Standard, March 22 2006)
posted by David Rowan at Wednesday, March 22, 2006
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