A sign of things to come for the UK’s newspaper industry?

This week, the Guardian Media Group (GMG) has been forced to admit that it is considering closing The Observer – the world’s oldest Sunday paper at 218 years old.

Although the GMG is apparently looking at different cost-cutting options including redundancies, the future doesn’t look too bright for the newspaper. The potential closure has been put down to poor financial results due to the recession and “longer-term structural change in the newspaper industry.”

Over the last few years, our newspaper industry has been facing difficult times, struggling with falling reader numbers largely due to more and more people reading their news on the web. Looking for ways of making money from online content (maybe the Observer will end up entirely electronic) is not however proving to be straightforward.

Rupert Murdoch announced yesterday that his Sunday Times newspaper is to set up its own website and charge readers to access articles – he’s confident that this is the way forward for the industry.

However, only time will tell if this makes for a successful business model, particularly in light of the findings of a report conducted by the European Union. It found that a third of young people and 15 per cent of older groups won’t pay for online content.

It looks like Murdoch and his peers might have a tough job on their hands. We can only wait and see what happens, but the newspaper industry clearly needs to do something fairly drastic over the coming years in order to survive.

Tags: pr

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 5th, 2009 at 3:44 pm and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.