‘Any Editor Who Thinks He Can Sell His Newspaper Entirely On News …Is Not Going To Succeed’ – Peter Wright, Editor Of The UK’s Mail On Sunday

Philip M. Stone November 27, 2007

Back in July ftm suggested that newspapers desperate for new revenue streams should take a close look at their circulation distribution systems, and maybe those systems could be used to deliver more than just the daily newspaper, so we take particular note that Peter Wright, editor of the UK’s Mail on Sunday tabloid gave basically the same message recently to the Society of Editors conference.

As the editor of the newspaper that gave away Prince’s latest CD – and boosted that Sunday’s circulation by some 600,000  at a cost thought to be around £1.5 million after royalties and promotional costs --  Wright is pretty expert in the covermount game.

And he told editors at their annual UK conference that if they don’t become expert at adding value to sell their newspapers then their newspapers won’t be around 10 years from now.

“Any editor who believes he can sell his newspaper entirely on news and that magazines, supplements, promotions and yes, CDs and DVDs, are simply embarrassments imposed on them by commercial management is not going to succeed. Any editor who wants his paper still to be here in 2020 needs to be constantly thinking about what he can add to his newspaper and what he can put into his polybag (plastic wrap) that will make his newspaper better value to the reader,” he said.

Now that comes as humble pie words from an editor of a 2.3 million Sunday circulation newspaper. He’s saying the news product doesn’t do it anymore and it’s what else is given away or sold cheaply with the newspaper that will make or break a newspaper’s circulation success.

But he made the same point as did ftm back in July that no other business has a distribution network that can deliver at such a small price – far lower than the mail – such items as catalogues, CDs, DVDs even chocolate bars.

“When the history of newspapers is written, it may well be that the greatest innovation of our generation is the humble polybag,” Wright said. Newspapers are no longer mere news services but "cultural packages ... put together by a remarkable collection of people with fingers on the pulse."

His advice seems to be followed by most of the UK national newspapers that in October gave away everything from CD and DVD collections to free cross-channel ferry tickets to France.

Newspaper marketing folks now need to get really into deals they can do with manufacturers who want to distribute product for very little cost. A manufacturer of a new chocolate bar could do a lot worse than make a deal with a newspaper to distribute a small free sample with the daily or Sunday newspaper. That polybag or even polybags could become huge revenue earners.

In Europe newspaper groups now make around 20% of their revenue by selling – rather than giving away – promotional books, CDs, DVDs and the like. The Brits still prefer to give things away, but that often means people – usually young people – buy the newspaper just to get to the freebie and literally toss the newspaper away without a look.

Of those 600,000 extra sales the Mail on Sunday got for that Prince CD giveaway, only about 30,000 sales stuck for the following week – or about ½ of 1%. Worth the effort? Since the UK audited results allow such promotions to affect the monthly averages then to the newspaper it apparently is worth the effort.

It does bring up the question, however, of whether that is the way to recapture the young reader. Rupert Murdoch doesn’t think so and he has often decried that his UK newspapers give away what they do.

In a fascinating session with the House of Lords Communications Committee that visited New York in September but whose minutes of that meeting have just been released, Murdoch said his newspapers have basically given up on trying to recapture the young reader.

“Young people are not turning to physical papers for their news. This is particularly true in the US but applies in the UK, too,” he said according to the minutes that concluded “Murdoch has tried various ways to reverse this trend but with little success. His job, therefore, is to get the young to visit the Web sites of his papers.”

And he made another point that ftm has often made in the past. Look at the most popular stories accessed on web news sites such as Yahoo, CNN, or BBC and on those days without real breaking news it is the soft stories that gets the most downloads, not hard news.

From that testimony ftm deduces that what we have said about the distribution system as a profit-center is very much the right approach. Since giveaways for the sake of giveaways do not sustain much higher circulation, then use the distribution system to make money – to deliver items others want distributed for free at a very low cost.

Already the smart marketing people add up the value of the shopping coupons in each edition and can easily show how the value of coupons often easily outweighs the cost of the newspaper, and actually delivering manageable-sized product – a free bar of soap, candy, a thin book, whatever, just goes to adding to the value of that day’s newspaper and the newspaper gets paid for it, too.

It may make the journalist sad to think that their product alone doesn’t do the job any more, but as editors and publishers are fond of saying these days, business models are changing and this is just one more way how.

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