Publish Asia 2005 -- Pushing publishing to new heights

Publish Asia went to Bangkok in April and turned in one of the most thought-provoking conferences for a long while.

The Ifra Asia-run publishing summit took many of the hot button issues confronting the newspaper industry – from the compact craze to the future of advertising and the hunt for young readers – and put them under the microscope.

Bookending the conference were sessions on the A-Z of CtP and classified advertising in crisis beforehand and workshops on advertising sales and leadership afterwards. And breakout sessions on investment strategies, waste control, distribution, high quality printing and pre-press workflow completed the line-up, as well as a small exhibition. In all, about 600 participants attended the event.

The ups and downs of compact

No conference would be complete these days without a tribute to the format change phenomenon. And rightly so. In Bangkok, Terry Grote, managing director of The Independent in London, recalled the dilemmas and decisions that led to his newspaper producing a compact edition in September 2003 – and lifting circulation by 20 percent as a result.

For Grote, it was a journey that was “exciting, exhilarating, scary and problematic”. He admitted that when the compact paper was started in tandem with the broadsheet: “We had no idea whatsoever that we would drop the broadsheet.”

Moving to the smaller format, the fourth in the market Independent found itself with more women readers, more young readers (aged 15-24) and more ABC1 upmarket readers.

What’s more they were reading the paper more and saying they were happier with the paper – 93 percent of readers thought their paper was good or excellent.

However, the paper has now been able to force through some price increases, and a redesign from six to seven column should help revenues too.

Manfred Werfel, Ifra’s deputy chief executive, highlighted the pitfalls awaiting papers that made the format switch: such as the advertising issue Grote and The Independent faced or the need for a page planning system to ensure correct pairing of the smaller pages. In the production process, he suggested trimming and stitching to improve the look of the tabloid.

Hardev Kaur, editor-at-large of the New Straits Times of Malaysia, described how the move to compact became a process of rejuvenation after a decade in decline. NST buried its broadsheet last month (april). But as she said: “It’s not the end of the road for us, there’s still a lot of work to do.”

Future markets

Andre Nair, chairman and CEO of Mediaedge:cia Asia Pacific, looked into the future to explain how the worlds of advertising and marketing are changing. There are more choices for consumers than ever before, Nair said. There was hyper-fragmentation of consumer behaviour and active avoidance of advertising through technology such as personal video recorders. While consumers are money rich, they also time poor and suffering an information overload from more and more marketing clutter. And the big retailer – like Wal-Mart or Tesco – is on the way to becoming a media baron.

Trends in advertising

In an afternoon dedicated to advertising, Peter Zollman of Classified Intelligence, a research firm, warned of the crisis in classified advertising. “It won’t get any easier any time soon,” he said.

Zollman listed the trends of 2005: e-commerce enabled ads; free ads; web to print publishing; yellow pages and classifieds tying up; self-service ad placement; and the the twin dangers of craigslist and eBay. One way for newspapers to defend their turf is to run event auctions which allow them to participate in the transaction. “Essentially, it’s eBay sponsored by the newspapers,” Zollman said.

Sally Winfield, the veteran classified chief at Associated Newspapers in London who is now managing director of Loot, concentrated on leadership, using the never-far-from-disaster Polar adventure of Sir Ernest Shackleton in 1914 as a yardstick.

Multimedia selling specialist Mike Blinder explained strategies to sell in print and online. There is nothing different about selling web space. “In the 1600s if you wanted to sell a cow you nailed a note to a tree. Nothing has changed but the note and the tree.”

Tham Kai Wor, until recently head of marketing at Singapore Press Holdings, demonstrated how SPH managed to hold a 50 percent market share of the advertising pie in the Lion City. “SPH does not have a monopoly of eyeballs,” he said. “The challenge is for time.”

The evening brought the Asia Media Awards which saw SPH’s newspapers scoop 11 of the prizes. But it was Yomiuri Shimbun of Japan that won the first prize for the best in print on a double-width press.

Strategy, strategy, strategy

Day two saw business book author Mark Daniell lay down some guidelines on how to make a success of strategic planning. David Armstrong, editor in chief of the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong focused on China’s booming newspaper industry. “Deng Xiaoping said: ‘To get rich is glorious.’ Newspapers have taken this message to heart,” Armstrong said.

From India came Girish Agarwal, a director of the Dainik Bhaskar group in India. He showed how the company built up a new daily in the Gujarati language by listening to consumers – 1.2 million of them. After 19 months it has a circulation of 578,000.

Believing in new media

Ifra’s mobile guru, Dr Stig Nordqvist, and Sandy Prieto-Romualdez, CEO of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, explained how print and mobile could complement each other.

Probably the high point of the two days was the presentation by Rob Curley of the Lawrence World-Journal in Kansas, where the Internet operation feeds growth in print and TV – and it brings in younger readers. It was a tour de force by the Internet pioneer. As one CEO told me: “He showed how you could do all the things with the web and print that our people always say can’t be done.”

Mike Coleman, who runs Gannett South Newspaper Group in the United States, rounded off the day with an explanation of Gannett’s young reader magazine strategy. These free magazines are in profit after a year and have covered the investment in two. “We now have nine of these publications, with many more to come,” Coleman said.

Page first published: 23.05.2005