Fairfax Media has been publishing newspapers in Australia since before there was an Australia – so making the change from a newspaper company to a multimedia company is no easy matter.

But there isn’t any choice, says Jack Matthew, Chief Executive Officer for Australia-based Fairfax’s Metro Media, the keynote speaker at Publish Asia. Not because of audience decline – it has actually increased – but because the revenue model has changed.

Print audience is declining, but, thanks to digital media, the overall audience grew 30 per cent over the past five years, he said.

“We don’t have a content problem. More people consume our content today than ever have in the past,” he said. “What we have is a business model problem.”

Like a lot of media companies, Fairfax faces the “print dollars, digital cents” conundrum – the revenues that come from digital advertising and audiences is not replacing those lost to print.

Mr Matthew believes Fairfax has come up with a solution: maintain quality journalism as the “secret sauce” as the core of the business, but change the way of looking at the audience.

He believes that only by changing the traditional metric based on circulation to one based on overall audience can newspaper companies succeed – “not talking about platforms but talking about eyeballs.” He said the goal is to “sell targeted eyeballs across all platforms in a highly engaged atmosphere”.

“That won’t only protect your yield, it will grow your yield,” he said.

“The core principle we have moving forward is that we’re no longer thinking about business in terms of geography and platforms but about audience and content,” he said, and his presentation focused on some of the ways it was going about it.

Here is one of them:

Fairfax’s advertising sales team is integrated and platform agnostic, but most media agencies aren’t built that way. “The difficulty is presenting an integrated sales strategy to a fragmented agency,” Mr Matthew said.

Fairfax solved this by presenting single-price packages, not broken down by component media.  “In today’s complex world, simplicity has never been more of a virtue than it is today,” said Mr Matthew.

For more news from Publish Asia, take a look at our conference blog.

Gazeta Wyborcza is not only Poland’s leading national daily; it also has 20 local editions and staff around the country. Those editions included sports sections – both in print and online – but they weren’t working.

“Before we developed Sport.pl/local, no sport section had traffic of more than 100,000 page views per month. There were no digital revenues. Seventy per cent of content came from the print section,” says Marcin Gadzinski, Head of Development for Sport.pl, which replaced the local websites to great success.

The reason it worked? Gazeta Wyborcza recognised that other newspapers were no longer their main competition for sport.

For more on this story, please see our Sports News Conference Blog

"One of the legacies of Steve Jobs is that he's taught us to pay for content," says Adam Bird, director, McKinsey & Company, speaking of the late Apple founder in a presentation on how consumers behave with new technologies.

When it comes to paid-for apps, books, news and magazines are doing quite well, he says. Speaking at a World Newspaper Congress session dedicated to technology, Bird focuses on how consumers are interacting with the new devices.

"If we start to think about technology in general, the only real certainty is that we are going to have more technology," he says. "The sheer volume and pace of change is phenomenal. E-mails per second are up to 2.9 million. There are 20 hours of content uploaded to YouTube per minute. The sheer scale of this is absolutely phenomenal."

What's changing the most? Bird suggests looking at mobile developments as they become more social, more video, more local.

"If we look at it in terms of mobile, if we isolate one thing that will happen, it is that every phone will become a smartphone, and it is absolutely changing how people are using them," he says. "It's almost used for everything but voice communication; we're certainly seeing that trend accelerating. Mobile is becoming a serious advertising platform as well."

"Research shows repeatedly that each time you add a screen in your life, you spend more time with media. Once you have a PC and a smartphone and an iPad, the time spent on these increases dramatically. Content is becoming more personalized, more social, more mobile and more user generated."

When discussing world press trends, it is important to remember that what is true for one region is not true for another, and that differences vary even from newspaper to newspaper.

That's the message from Christoph Riess, CEO of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA), to Latin American publishers and editors gathered in Bogota, Colombia. His update of world press trends at the America Latina conference highlighted opportunities available to the Latin American press.

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