Hello, David Myton here and I’m standing in as guest blogger for Steven Schwartz, who is otherwise engaged today. I help to look after Steven’s web site and perform some other media-related duties here in his office.

Attentive readers (and I’m sure that’s all of you) will recall that a few weeks ago Steven blogged about the threats facing the newspaper industry.

He wrote that

“If enough people decide they don’t want to read newspapers any more, and the journalism profession disintegrates, then it could be argued that the market has spoken. It’s happened before with other products.”

And so it has. Markets rise and fall, as do empires. Products come and products go. No business model lasts forever. But when something old passes away, something new rises in its place. Invariably, a smart entrepreneur or innovator examines the market, finds a gap and plugs it.

I detected the whiff of Hanrahan-ism (“we’ll all be rooned”) in a recent article by media academics David McKnight and Penny O’Donnell on the future of newspapers.

“The content-rich newspaper websites in Australia and overseas are living off the assets of newspapers and their present advertising. Many non-newspaper sites, in turn, depend on them. If newspapers decline, the tap will be turned off and the apparent abundance of news will dry up.”

And there’s more …

“Advertising online is much cheaper than print … Online advertising will pay for fewer journalists’ salaries … This will have momentous effects on the public’s ability to get quality journalism, as opposed to recycled press releases.”

Is the glass half empty, or half full? For McKnight and O’Donnell it appears to be the former as they bemoan the increasingly outcast state of the “quality” newspapers.

Say what you will about Rupert Murdoch, but you can’t accuse of him of being dumb. So why is he investing 650 million pounds (that’s a lot of dollars) on three new full-colour printing plants in the UK? Seems no-one told Mr Murdoch his business is bound to go pear-shaped.

According to followthemedia.com News Limited is also about to plough A$52 million into a new state-of-the-art printing plant in Townsville. Jason Scott, North Queensland general manager, is quoted as saying:

“People are still writing epitaphs for newspapers but the reality is that the industry is still building more presses today than it ever has.”

New printing plants are being built across North America and the UK. What it means, of course, is that publishers are refining their business plans. They’re taking a punt that more colour will lead to more sales and, with printing plants increasingly being shared by publishers, they’re trimming costs too. They’re looking to adapt, survive, and even prosper. It’s true that the old model of journalism is in trouble, but many proprietors are doing their best to innovate and find solutions.

Even the saintly UK Guardian, supported as it is by the Scott Trust, is taking nothing for granted.

According to Managing Director Tim Brooks it must “continue the transformation of this business from a simple newspaper company … to being a genuinely international digital business that has every prospect of surviving the 21st century as it survived the 20th century”.

“We need to adjust our costs in respect of our newspaper publishing operation to match the fact that, like our competitors, revenues are under pressure and declining in some key areas. At the same time we must make sure the organisation is sufficiently resourced to take advantage of the explosive growth in the digital business.”

In other words, the Guardian is refining its business plan and adjusting to changed market conditions: it’s seen the future, and for the Guardian the future is digital.

While many established newspaper businesses (I heard at the New Media Summit in Melbourne last week that the new descriptor favoured by the digerati for newspapers is “Heritage media”) are adapting and evolving, new media platforms are also on the rise.

Take a look at openDemocracy, Eurozine, Monocle, or YouTube’s CitizenNews as just some examples of emerging different models.

News Corp’s Australia chief John Hartigan said recently there is a much we don’t know and don’t understand about the social, political or industry implications of the internet. But he is confident the digital age gives us greater choice and more convenience.

“If anything, it doesn’t undermine the value of good journalism, it makes good journalism even more important.”

I think Hartigan is right and the Hanrahans are wrong. I for one am optimistic that good journalism will survive, certain that new media will be crucial to its survival, and confident somebody somewhere will be smart enough to come up with the right business model.

- David Myton

Filed under: Issues and ideas, Newspapers by Steven Schwartz