From Newspaper To Experience

Image credit: Getty Images, Michael Bodge/Flickr

Writing in the Guardian, journalist Simon Jenkins argues that publishers should learn from the lessons made by the music business rather than return to paywall media. He says that he viewed the evolution of the newspaper when he went to the Glastonbury music festival recently, and witnessed how people will still pay for the live experience:

The key must be to learn the lesson of the most tightly competitive medium of all: popular music. It has cast off its enslavement to recording studios and recast itself, almost in Victorian mode, as a mass movement for live audiences. Music online is all but free. Live costs a fortune. Young people will pay more for a gig in a club than for a Led Zeppelin CD.

This summer I have found myself attending four live events: the Hay Festival, Glastonbury, the CLA Game Fair and the Welsh Eisteddfod. All were packed. They had almost nothing in common, other than vast crowds being parted from considerable sums of money in the cause of affinity. While television companies and online projects ailed, live was booming.

If newspapers were anywhere at these events it was, crazily, as sponsors rather than profit-takers. They have let the torch of cultural championship pass to a new generation of promoters and impresarios. Local newspapers are quietly dying when they should be staging everything from commercial fairs to sporting events and arts and book festivals. There is money in all of them. Newspapers should not be investing in fancy printing presses but in the “long-tail” economics of live enterprise, with the printed word as a mere core activity.

…But to be secure a media operation must entice an audience to enjoy what the web cannot supplant, a paid-for exclusivity and an opportunity for a unique participative experience. Like other purveyors of culture, such as musicians, actors, writers and even church people, newspapers will have to generate new markets for their wares. Goodbye Guardian, welcome the Guardian Experience.

Goodbye Guardian. Hello the Guardian Experience

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