By most conventional measures, Britain’s newspapers look doomed. Young readers are abandoning them for the internet and television. The Daily Express and the Daily Mirror, both tabloids, have shed about two-thirds of their circulation since the mid-1980s. Yet Evgeny Lebedev, co-owner of the Independent and the Evening Standard, is optimistic. “People are hailing the death of newspapers,” he says. “But if you go into the Tube, you’ll see almost everybody is reading one.”Britain’s newspaper market is the world’s most savage. It is unusually competitive: there are nine national daily papers with a circulation of more than 200,000. And advertising has migrated online more quickly than elsewhere. Since 2009 more advertising money has been spent on the internet than on newspapers, according to ZenithOptimedia, a marketer. British papers receive no government funding (as is the case in France, for example). Indeed, they face a fearsome state-sanctioned competitor in the BBC.
http://www.economist.com/node/17853358?story_id=17853358
Bold newspapers: Britain’s embattled newspapers are leading the world in innovation
By most conventional measures, Britain’s newspapers look doomed. Young readers are abandoning them for the internet and television. The Daily Express and the Daily Mirror, both tabloids, have shed about two-thirds of their circulation since the mid-1980s. Yet Evgeny Lebedev, co-owner of the Independent and the Evening Standard, is optimistic. “People are hailing the death of newspapers,” he says. “But if you go into the Tube, you’ll see almost everybody is reading one.”