News International Expands Its Print, Web, Mobile and New Magazine To Grow All Its Businesses In The UK

Since Mathias Dopfner, CEO and Chairman of Axel Springer, was taking part in the same panel discussion, Hinton was polite enough not to pick a fight on which country was going to actually win the championship starting in Germany in just a few days, but both men expect the World Cup to be good for business.

Hinton, discussing the New Golden Age of Media at the World Newspaper Congress, made quite clear that News International was still very much in the newspaper business. He described his current policy Protect and Extend – protect the print products, and extend the digital offerings and the new magazines.

And he made clear that good journalism and proper investment in a quality print product will bring financial rewards for many years to come.

He said that The Times, Sunday Times, Sun and News of the World currently have a combined 20 million readership, giving them 43% of all UK adults. “Newspapers are an extremely healthy business to be in,” he declared in case any naysayer was there in the audience.

He said the company was investing $1 billion in new presses. “In three years time we’ll be producing 20 million newspapers a week with color on every page,” he declared.

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He said switching The Times to compact size has resulted in an 11% sales increase, and at the same time the page impressions for Times Online has tripled. “Online revenue at The Times is up 45% year-on-year”. He credited not just the editorial product but also “a great sales force.” He believes the recent decision to print a US edition of The Times will draw additional US readers to the Times Online website.

So print gets protected with added investment. But extending the business falls mainly in Internet and mobile products.

“In March The Sun set a new record of 6.8 million unique visitors with 138 million page views, “he declared. He said there has been good success with its new free classified section. Although he didn’t mention it, the Sun is supposedly building a MySpace component into its web site which would be yet another example of the “Extend” part of the philosophy.

He said there has been a start to charging for some services such as games and crossword puzzles, but the revenue didn’t amount to very much and it was really just a way of trying to get people used to paying for services in the future.

He said he runs a “Best, More and Instant” philosophy for the various multimedia legs. “Best” he says is what the printed newspaper can provided, “More” is what you get from the Internet, and “Instant” is the information fed to your mobile. And News International is going to be strongly involved with all.

The one product line he didn’t mention was whether free newspapers have any future with News International. There are stories circulating in London that the company will launch a free afternoon newspaper by the end of the year.

And his was not the only upbeat report given on the state of the UK newspaper business. Carolynn McCall, chief executive of Guardian Newspapers, enthused on how brilliantly the Guardian had changed to a Berlner size last year. “We changed everything but our values,” she said.

It took an 80 million pound investment in new color printing presses, and they needed to be installed within one year of order. She said the Guardian’s circulation has gone up from 354,000 before the new format to more than 400,000 today. The Observer, the group’s Sunday paper, has also just undergone a switch to Berlner and seen circulation rise from 440,000 to 500,000.

She said her sales people had been successful on convincing advertisers that even though the size of a page had shrunk that didn’t mean the advertising cost should be reduced, too. “A page is a page’” she said

The Guardian is now looking at what free giveaways get the job done best. DVDs certainly increase sales on the day but don’t increase loyalty. She said a recent wall poster about fish turned out to be a great success, especially with schools, and that might be a direction they go into, too..

And the newspaper is having good response with its special magazine “supplements,” she said, each publication adding about 50,000 – 70,000 circulation.

Listening to them both and one came away with the question, “What newspaper crisis?”