The proliferation of mobile devices offers the newspaper industry a shot at redemption — one it can’t afford to miss.
“Mobile is a great opportunity for the ‘do over,’ ” Tom Curley, chief executive of The Associated Press, said Wednesday at the 2011 conference in Denver of Associated Press Media Editors.
The board of APME, previously Associated Press Managing Editors, approved a name change Wednesday to reflect a broader membership.
Newspaper publishers failed to grasp how quickly the Internet would shift the center of gravity away from providers of information to consumers, Curley said during a panel session on “The Future of News.”
With revenues down by half since 2006, newspapers have paid dearly.
And while newspapers have figured out how to hold and boost readership through digital platforms, they haven’t found a business model yet to replace the lost revenues.
Curley said newspapers are doing a much better job at serving readers on mobile devices like iPhones than they did with the open Web, leaving him excited about the future.
Digital is the growth engine and eventually will overtake print as more consumers go “digital first,” William Dean Singleton, chairman of ap and publisher of The Denver Post, told the audience.
But for now, digital content continues to rely on a print-funded infrastructure.
At most newspaper companies, the printed product accounts for about 80 percent of revenues and digital products under 20 percent, Singleton said.
“Print is not dead, not by a long shot,” he said.
But it will look different, with a greater focus on watchdog journalism, storytelling and content from outside providers and the larger community, panelists said.
“We can’t do everything we used to do,” said Kate Marymont, a vice president at Gannett’s Community Publishing Division. Gannett is a media-holding company whose assets include USA Today.
“Commodity” content such as sports scores, briefs and nonlocal news will increasingly come from outside providers, Marymont said.
Another way Gannett is looking to cut costs and improve quality is to shift the layout of 81 newspapers to five “design studios” spread across the country, she said.
Expect industry consolidation to accelerate sharply in the next five years, Singleton added.
Consolidation offers a way to lower corporate overhead and provide large advertisers with a more direct path to a national audience, he said.
Aldo Svaldi: 303-954-1410, asvaldi@denverpost.com or
