What would D.R. Wijewardene do if he confronted today’s realities of readers migrating to online media platforms and the gradual decline of print advertising revenues? The question was raised several times during recent celebrations to mark the 130th birth anniversary of Sri Lanka’s first and best-known press baron who lived from 1886 to 1950. It is a timely poser. Around the world, print journalism’s established business models are crumbling. Many newspapers and magazines are losing circulation, audiences and revenues. Some have been downscaled, while many old and cherished titles have folded up, or gone entirely online (The Independent newspaper in the UK is the latest to do the latter). Advertisers usually follow where they think the eyeballs are moving.
The crisis is more intense in certain markets, particularly in the US and Europe. Print remains relatively robust in Asia: in countries like China, India and Thailand, newspapers are still penetrating new markets thanks to millions of families joining their expanding middle class. Buying a printed newspaper everyday and having it lying around the home is apparently a status symbol.
How are newspapers doing in Sri Lanka? We don’t have independently audited circulation figures, and all media companies are known to exaggerate their sales figures. So we can only speculate.
But anecdotal evidence and indications are not promising. A new study on the state of Lankan media, which I have just edited and is due to be released in May, shows that market survival is a big struggle for many smaller publishers. Some have been acquired by their larger rivals. All this suggests a long-term trend: the newspaper, especially in its printed form, is threatened in many markets and may even be endangered. The only choice for the industry is adaptation – or obsolescence.
The newsprint empire
Survival has always been a struggle for Lankan newspapers from the time first titles emerged in the 1830s. According to the scholar monk Kalukondayawe Pannasekera’s history of Lankan newspapers, we have had hundreds of new newspapers that never reached their first birthday.
A century ago, a Cambridge-educated young Ceylonese lawyer helped industrialice the print media in Sri Lanka that had been a cottage industry until then. Don Richard Wijewardene laid the foundation for his publishing house (Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Limited, or Lake House) by acquiring struggling newspaper titles – Dinamina (in 1914), the Ceylonese (re-launched as Ceylon Daily News in 1918) and the Ceylon Observer in 1923. He launched his own new titles from 1930.
According to H.A.J Hulugalle’s biography, ‘The Life and Times of D.R.Wijewardene’, he had regarded three P’s – the press, parliament and platform – as the most important instruments of political action. Even though Wijewardene rarely wrote on his own and avoided involvement in active politics, he effectively harnessed the Fourth Estate’s power to advocate for self-rule and liberal democracy.
Wijewardene had more capital, imagination and tenacity than many others who entered that business before or since his time. He also innovated at every stage of newspaper production: these included making good use of images, adopting clever advertising strategies and setting up a countrywide distribution network.
[pullquote]All this suggests a long-term trend: the newspaper, especially in its printed form, is threatened in many markets and may even be endangered[/pullquote]
Wijewardene transformed our newspaper industry from limited circulation to mass production. When he set out, the average daily had a circulation of around 3,000 to 4,000 copies. By the time he died in 1950, Dinamina was selling around 70,000 copies and Daily News about 55,000 copies, according to his biography. The total population at the time was 6.6 million (1946 Census).
Digital media rising
Six and a half decades on, much has changed. Radio, television and the web peddle breaking news round the clock. To remain relevant, newspapers today have to offer better analysis and opinions (so much so that some in the west now call themselves ‘viewspapers’).
Some newspapers have also gone ‘multimedia’ on their websites by offering audio and video elements, as well as other interactive features. But it’s not simply a matter of throwing everything into one ‘digital basket’ or mimicking newspapers online.
Media consumers these days are more demanding and discerning. What exactly do they want? Understanding this is key to survival and success.
In January, the Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA) released findings of a survey on how residents in the Western Province of Sri Lanka perceive and consume mainstream and social media. Conducted by Social Indicator, CPA’s survey research unit, it involved 1,743 randomly selected men and women, interviewed in Sinhala or Tamil language over June-July 2015. They were asked about mobile phone use and web access.
(Full report at: www.bit.ly/mediasurveywp)
The survey showed private television as the most popular source of news,followed by Face book and the web in general. When breaking down the findings by age category, Facebook emerged as the main source of news for the 18-24 year respondents, followed by private television stations and the web.
Findings also revealed how more and more media consumers are no longer passively receiving media content, but also critiquing, repackaging and generating related (or new)content on their own. Their tool of choice for all this interactivity is the smartphone – which is probably the biggest single-tech threat to mainstream media everywhere.
Of course, the Western Province is not the whole of Sri Lanka. But that’s where most media companies and advertisers are located, along with a large share of the audience. Its media consumption patterns give us a good indication of national trends that will emerge in the coming years.
Credibility, stupid!
So what would D.R.Wijewardene do if he were building his business today? He might invest in radio and/or television, but with a strong digital integration. He might even find a viable income stream from digital and online publishing without locking up public interest content behind paywalls.
On the other hand, given his ability to see ahead of others, he might invest everything in the telecom business where companies increasingly control both delivery pipelines and digital content that flows through them. That’s where fortunes will be made (or lost) – the telecom frontier holds the greatest potential for influencing public opinion in the 21st century.
Another pertinent question to ask: where are the budding D.R.Wijewardenes of our time? What are their startups, and how are they engaging today’s media market and consumers? How are they balancing public interest journalism with profit-making?
[pullquote]Findings also revealed how more and more media consumers are no longer passively receiving media content, but also critiquing, repackaging and generating related (or new) content on their own[/pullquote]
The challenge here is to spot the outliers and (apparent) odd-balls who are not playing by any known rules, but reinventing their own. For example, look out for those that blur traditional barriers between news analysis and entertainment (through political satire), or those who combine crowd-sourced insights with expert knowledge.
Print media is not dead, but is clearly in need of a radical reinvention. In my view, the biggest decider of success or failure – today, as it was a century ago – is not the medium, but the message. To put it more bluntly, it’s credibility, stupid!
In my own lifetime of five decades, I have seen two leading publishing houses wither and die – the once-venerable Times of Ceylon (in 1985) and Independent Newspapers (Dawasa Niwasa, in 1990). The reasons for their demise were complex, but they had only just invested in modern offset printing. They failed not because of any technology deficit, but by losing credibility and societal relevance.
That lesson presents an imperative for ALL media, old and new: engage your audiences and grow, or stray away from it and head to an assured obsolescence. Being large, loud and arrogant is not a guarantee of survival (remember the dinosaurs). Being kept on ‘life support’ on public or private money can (and must!) also has sane limits.
In the coming years, waves of technology, demographics and economics will sweep away some relatively good media along with much of the deadwood that deserves extinction (even plant-eating dinosaurs didn’t make it). It is the adaptive and credible players who will be left to write tomorrow’s first drafts of history.