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Dyson at Large: Why I’ve stopped buying my old paper

This is an uncomfortable confession, but here goes: I’ve stopped buying the Birmingham Mail.

Yes, that’s the title I grew up reading, spent months on as a nervous work experience teenager, sweated years on as industrial correspondent, news editor, features editor, deputy editor and editor.

Since leaving the paper in December 2009, I continued buying it every day I was in the city, even when its cover price rose to 50p a day, and 70p on Saturdays.

But from the middle of May, I was no longer willing to spend £13 or more a month buying it.

Why? Well, it’s got little to do with the price: I still happily spend hundreds of pounds a year on newsprint – nationals every day, regionals wherever I go, and three current affairs magazines by subscription.

It’s got even less to do with quality: in truth, I’m quite impressed with the Mail’s recent revamp, its higher story counts, extra columnists, modernised masthead and sensible use of some design templates.

The reason I’ve stopped buying the paper is because an exact replica is now available free of charge – yes, completely buckshee – on my iPad.

I’m owning up to my print desertion because this iPad moment deserves comment, debate and careful consideration by the industry.

iPad editions are not new, of course: The Guardian has been trying to sell me one for nearly a year, but at £9.99 a month this has not yet persuaded me to stop spending around £40 a month on the paper version.

So when I first noticed and downloaded the free Birmingham Mail iPad edition, I continued buying the printed product; but as the days went on, I quickly realised there was no point.

I had feared a catch: a free trial followed by sudden subscription demands; a plague of unwanted emails; whizzy adverts floating in and out of my screen.

But I’ve experienced no sell-on, no extra email spam and have found the facsimile adverts on the iPad screen far less intrusive than they are in print.

I can even download the Mail before my newsagent opens each morning, waking up to my local read while I sit in bed, sipping a mug of tea, with dawn birds tweeting.

Even a small fee would, I think, have dissuaded me from ‘going iPad’, but for free, zilch, zero, nothing – well, I’d be bonkers to carry on buying the paper, wouldn’t I?

And if this is the experience of a ‘Mail man’ – a former editor of the title for goodness sake, and one whose hobby is buying and hoarding newspapers – then how quickly will average readers switch once they discover it’s exactly the same, but free, on iPad?

There was no hullabaloo about the Mail’s free iPad edition, the launch quietly announced on 30 April.

“It’s free and available six days a week,” it whispered, “just search for ‘Birmingham Mail’ in the app store to get going. The Coventry Telegraph will launch later this month. We also plan to launch the Sunday Mercury later in the summer too.”

Once you get into the new e-edition, it’s not only a replica but offers more: a touch of the button producing ‘web text views’ of stories you want to read more easily, a camera icon accessing extra pictures, and a video icon providing footage.

“We think you’ll love it,” says the Mail in its blurb on the above link; and I do.

But as a ‘free’ app for users, I understand each initial download costs Trinity Mirror, the Mail’s publisher, several pounds – in addition to the £150-plus a year in lost revenue for every daily reader who stops buying the paper.

So how can it be a successful strategy to provide costly apps for nothing, and lose cover price revenue?

There’s no wealth of industry debate on this yet, perhaps because of the soft launch, although the emerging opinion seems divided.

Eagle-eyed American commentator Douglas Hebbard – who spotted the Mail’s iPad edition five days before it was announced – said the free replica was “pretty much everything I would advise against”.

Writing on his Talking New Media blog on 25 April, Douglas accepted that Trinity Mirror was “trying to save their print advertising base by boosting readership” and that “the idea is that the loss of paid subscriptions is acceptable if print production costs will go away”.

But he warned: “It is a reasonable strategy if, and only if, the ad team can then sell digital ads. Without those paid ads there is zero revenue to be found in a digital replica with no paid circulation and no new digital ads sold.”

Less critical was Tim Rowell, formerly the Daily Telegraph’s digital publisher, who reckoned the free iPad edition may succeed.

Tim’s comments on The Drum website in December were actually based on the Mirror’s free iPad edition, but are also relevant for the group’s regional roll-out.

He said while the iPad edition was “unashamedly print in approach” and would “get criticised by the digerati”, the advantage was that “it won’t cost much to produce each day”.

He argued that free subscribers would boost ABC figures and help advertising sales “across print and iPad”, which “within a market where everyone else is charging for content, may have stolen a march on direct competitors”.

Doubtless there will be more vociferous debate over free iPad editions and how they might – or might not – help salvage regional dailies with increased advertising income.

Meanwhile, as iPad ownership surges, I predict an even steeper drop in print sales in Birmingham, Coventry and any other city offering free digital editions.

I just hope any extra advertising quickly outweighs lost cover price revenues so that Trinity Mirror doesn’t have to reverse its ‘free’ strategy.

Because once they’ve stopped, it’s always damned hard to persuade readers to start buying the product again.

16 comments

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  • May 29, 2013 at 8:54 am
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    Interesting contrast between the two current top articles. On the one hand we have the Echo increasing its cover price, rightly justifying the need to fund and maintain journalistic resource rather than continually cutting costs. Then you have the Mail giving it all away completely free. As Steve says, once you’ve lost a print reader it’s very hard to get them back again so even if they are hoping to start charging for the iPad edition eventually it’s a high risk strategy.

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  • May 29, 2013 at 9:37 am
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    In the current marketplace it is difficult to imagine a outcome whereby net income per reader is boosted by this strategy.

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  • May 29, 2013 at 9:58 am
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    Can I repeat an analogy I used before ..

    Two shops in a town, one at the bottom of a steep hill – Bottom Shop – and the other at the top – Top Shop.

    All the residents live at the bottom of the hill.

    In Top Shop, a wide selection of goods, at reasonable prices. The shop is open 5 or 6 days a week, during business hours by and large. After about 8am, no fresh goods appear until the next day. Sometimes stocks run out.

    In Bottom Shop, exactly the same goods available, but all of them FREE. The shop is open 24/7 and fresh goods are available – for FREE – instantly. There are never issues with stock availablity.

    Which would you choose?

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  • May 29, 2013 at 10:02 am
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    My point ….

    In the case of regional newspapers, both shops are operated by the same management!!!!!

    I often wonder what would happen if the papers didn’t put any content on the website other than commercial/archive stuff.

    The answer used to be … ‘if we don’t, someone else will’. So let them. Just because Tesco exists, doesn’t mean Sainsbury’s can’t.

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  • May 29, 2013 at 10:40 am
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    Yeah – it’s my fears too. All TM staff have been given a three-line whip to have a link to the free ipad editions in their email signatures too, where it exists for their paper… It does seem to be a bit ‘don’t buy the paper, get it here free’.

    It’s incredible – what other industry would deliberately undermine its own products?

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  • May 29, 2013 at 11:17 am
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    The iPad editions are exact replicas of the print copy – why? Newspaper subbing is great for hard copies and they can look very good. They work to grab the reader’s attention in a newsagent with a hard hitting front page. But there’s no reason to simply put the pdfs of each page on the e-edition. You can be a lot more creative with this to engage readers. You can link in older stories from the previous weeks or months so they can follow the story development. I don’t know much about the advertising side of things but surely you could tie in the advert price to the number of hits a story gets in a day, not just a price depending on what page it’s on. So for the Mail it might be if the nurse story on the front gets more than 10,000 hits then Jimmy Spices have to pay an extra £100 on top of the base rate fee etc.

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  • May 29, 2013 at 11:53 am
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    When they tell me to put something corporate on my email signature, or put a huge ‘no smoking’ sign in my car, or write some industry lobby guff to my MP(send a copy to your DMD or else!), I just ignore them. No one sacked me for having an independent spirit.

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  • May 29, 2013 at 12:26 pm
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    It’s clearly a gamble, but looking at Birmingham Mail sales decline in recent times it’s not hard to see why a different approach is required. Yes, it may blow up in their faces but we’re fast arriving at the point of no return anyway when it comes to following the traditional model of monetising your content. Trinity clearly think they can develop a more attractive readership for advertisers, but can’t do so while cover prices rise and rise. So they are ditching the one cost base you don’t need in a digital setting and hoping that they can grow that audience to raise the premium they place on their ads.

    Will it pay off? Time will tell – but a bigger question has to be whether or not there is any real alternative. No-one has the fool-proof solution so surely the time is right to test the water in a different way?

    Yes, it’s a gamble, but every now and then he who dares will invariably win.

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  • May 29, 2013 at 12:48 pm
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    In a Scottish company there is a twenty-something digital development manager who tells all the editors to put all of their content on to the web as his ‘research’ shows that the circulation is not affected.

    “They’re coming to take us away, ha, ha, hee, hee, to the funny farm…”

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  • May 29, 2013 at 2:35 pm
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    There is no digital lifeboat for regionals.
    Lest we forget, they were built on classified advertising – it’s gone !

    There is no hope of getting costs down to a level where what revenues are left from cheap as chips network digital display will support any kind of quality in content and be profitable.

    No sane person in the business should believe otherwise. In the meantime some will earn a good living from the management of decline.

    Steve don’t refer to the Guardian when trying to address serious commercial issues, its not from the planet real commercial world.

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  • May 29, 2013 at 3:15 pm
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    The shop analogy fails because people weren’t coming to the Mail’s ‘shop’ when it was charging anyway. Some very good journalists have tried very hard to come up with ways to improve the Mail’s circulation performance for a long time. It was one of the last on-day papers until two years ago. It launched, and then scrapped, geographic editions at a time when most others were having to kill of theirs it has tried numerous redesigns but still circulation falls faster than elsewhere. This suggests that people don’t feel they need to pay for the Mail, so what should it do? Bury heads in the sand and pretend that people will one day realise what they are missing? Or try to catch as many people as possible with your very good content by giving it to them in a way they want it? We have a choice: We can hang on to the dwindling number of loyal print readers and hope something changes or we can attempt to appeal to as many people as possible. One size doesn’t need to fit all papers. But in a city the size of Birmingham, a mainstream daily newspaper selling less than 50k copies a day needs to use any route it can to get to new readers.
    Steve Dyson is still a Birmingham Mail reader, remember. The challenge is for the ad team to commercialise him as a reader. In that sense, there’s nothing new there.

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  • May 29, 2013 at 4:21 pm
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    Many thanks for all comments – really interesting viewpoints.

    My own hope is that Trinity Mirror know exactly what they’re doing, and that they’re not just ‘experimenting’ with the Midland titles…

    Because however useful the free iPad edition is, it can’t last unless the lost cover price revenues are at least replaced by extra advertising.

    I’ll return to the subject with ABC data at some future date.

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  • May 30, 2013 at 3:08 pm
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    Interesting. Print sales at T-M’s The Journal and Newcastle (ex-Evening) Chronicle are plummeting, and the new, ‘improved’ ChronicleLive website is dire. I have a suspicion that an iPad/Android version would help to slow the loss of ‘Audience’ and advertising revenue, but unfortunately, in contrast to the Mail, The Journal and Chronicle’s quality have been plummeting in time to the sales figures, so unless something is done to make them more readable, there would be little point in reading a digital version.

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  • May 31, 2013 at 9:44 am
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    Referring to the ‘shop’ analogy…

    It isn’t quite that simple, in that you must own an iPad (or other applicable techno gizmo) to be allowed into the shop at the bottom of the hill.

    This is actually even worse for circulation, as you not only lose all the techno gizmo-equipped readers, but also all those who resent the fact that they can’t get your product for free whilst others can. I’m thinking particularly here about the more senior readers (of which there are many on my patch, with good home penetration) who are unlikely to own or go and buy an iPad just to read the local paper.

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  • May 31, 2013 at 10:51 am
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    I haven’t read Tim Rowell’s commments in full, only here, but I trust Steve to have reproduced them in context. And I have to take issue with the suggestion: “it won’t cost much to produce each day”.
    Granted, the specific, extra costs of producing the iPad edition may not be much, but that is assuming the fixed cost of all the journalists will be borne by the print edition.
    There’s the rub.

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  • June 3, 2013 at 10:18 am
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    Just to clarify the ‘shop’ analogy.

    1 I am talking digital (in all its guises – PC, Mac, tablet, phone) versus print but I take the point that many people don’t have tablets (and of those who do, not all are interested in news)

    2 I don’t follow the point about people not coming to the Mail’s shop. Sales may have been declining but there must have been some sales!!!

    Essentially, one is free and easy to get (but makes virtually no money without the support of the other).

    The other costs money and is less easy to get (but does make money WITHOUT the support of the other).

    However the first stops people from buying the second, thus giving a spiral of decline.

    The other is

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