The migration of news and newspapers online has been steadily happening over the past 5 years.  I personally no longer feel the need to buy a newspaper on a week day as I know I can get all the news I need from me Google homepage, and also more recently twitter, without the need to payout for it or scour through pages of uninterested garbage to get to the useful stuff.

RSS readers and social news forums bring the best, most important news stories to my attention in an instant and give people access to such a vast amount of news that there is no way that once a day, physical publications can keep up.

But for the newspapers, print is important.  It has traditionally been where they earn their money.  Print advertising is still big business and it is these offline placements and inserts where the publications have traditionally cashed in.

News stories earlier in January however indicated that a shift change could be coming.  Reports on the Guardian website announced that US newspaper the LA times, was earning enough revenue from its online advertising programme to cover its entire editorial payroll, without taking account for offline advertising.  This is pretty huge news in the newspaper world as, even though all the publications use online advertising as an additional revenue stream, this has never, to my knowledge, been such a significant percentage of revenue.

In the same week it was reported that the financial times were making 80 staff redundant as they looked to streamline their business and invest more heavily in online and digital channels.  Whilst these two stories alone are not enough to suggest the future of newspapers is online, are they representative of a shift change in the newspaper market and indicative of the path the industry is set to take?

Whilst I think it would be difficult to build a mainstream news brand and publication purely online, it would be less difficult for an existing well known newspaper as they will already have a readership.  And with the revenues reported by the LA times a purely online presence could be very profitable.  It would also remove a lot of the overheads associated with offline media and make for a much more streamlined organisation.

Of course the advertising model would need to be sound.  Much of the premium CPM placements are dying a death as people look for more accountability from their online marketing spend but so long as the publication can keep innovating and offering flexible advertising programmes then there is no reason they couldn’t see the same success as the LA times has done.

Guardian Article – History in the making in LA

Digital Bulletin – Financial Times accounce 80 redundancies