PETER BRUCE: Is the writing really on the wall for printed newspapers?

When Koos Bekker calls time on printed newspapers, as he did in a long piece published in City Press and Rapport this past weekend, it may be that he is talking to his own book.

Explaining the decision by Naspers, of which he is chair, to stop printing a slew of titles in the next few months, he writes that “within a few years, no economy the size of SA’s will have any daily newspaper being sold on the street. Longer term, not even the US.”

It’s hard to argue, but not impossible. Newspaper sales all over the democratic world are down sharply as readers have moved online. Advertising revenue has followed them.

Bekker himself has been a spectacular beneficiary. A 2001 decision that he maintains was pure luck to buy 46% of the Chinese internet business Tencent for $32m, paid off handsomely. Today that stake, now below 35%, is worth a staggering $133bn. Just recently the release by Tencent of a new online game boosted Naspers’ market value by R130bn. He’s become a digital business, our version of Big Tech.

Other local publishers have no answer to this kind of money. He will migrate a string of titles, Rapport, Beeld and City Press among them, online. They will initially keep their brand identities but in all likelihood they will eventually vanish into Netwerk24 and News24, which has grown into a big subscription businesses, attracting, Bekker wrote, 9.5-million page views a day.

Some of this is obviously sad to anyone who grew up with newspapers. The process of making a newspaper involves the selection, editing and placement of stories in a way that allows you to choose one publication over another, but no-one fights for it now. It’s too expensive. Paper, printing and distribution make up almost two-thirds of newspaper costs, all of which can be magicked away at a stroke by going online.

That said, print is proving a sticky customer and newspapers in big markets and smaller ones like ours are still standing, still at the bottom of the driveway in the morning, and in not a few markets actually growing.

I was amused to read at the end of Bekker’s piece that he was writing “in his personal capacity”, but obviously he was given the space because he’s chair of Naspers and Prosus.

Newspapers do this routinely, but the only place you might really be writing in your personal capacity in a newspaper is in a letter to the editor, still, for me, the most important real estate in print.

Bekker was right to chase digital subscriptions when he did, starting small in 1998, with News24. Focusing on content, he has since spent a lot of money scooping up journalists from competitors, including Business Day.

It was the closure of Sapa, the national press agency funded by all newspaper groups, about 10 years ago that really gave News24 its big moment. Cutting Sapa was a dreadful mistake. To this day I deeply regret not fighting, to the extent that I could as editor of Business Day, to keep it funded.

Business Day tried to go “digital first” in 2011 by publishing online everything we had the moment we had it, but changes in ownership and management and strategy made it extremely difficult to sustain. It has since rebounded digitally but a lot of time was lost. A circulation slide was stopped and digital subscriptions are growing steadily.

Back in the day the models were big papers like the Financial Times and the New York Times which drove at digital 25 years ago while understanding that the editorial quality of their print editions was vital to maintain their markets while they transitioned revenue from print advertising to digital subscriptions.

When I left the FT after 20 years in 1996 it was selling fewer than 100,000 print newspapers a day around the world. Today it has more than 1-million digital subscribers. Its weekday edition will be digital only.

Obviously printed news won’t last forever, but I suspect rumours of its demise may be a little exaggerated.

For most newspapers still standing here abandoning print advertising is hard. Why would they while advertisers still like print? The spreads are big and you can’t do on a phone what you can on a page. Three or four expensive full-page print ads a week will keep even the most frustrated publisher in the game.

It is also why Bekker was careful to predict the demise here only of daily papers. His two Sunday papers will close but the Sunday Times, in my stable, still has a promising future in print. At the FT, its popular weekend edition would also survive. Readers and advertisers love it.

Obviously printed news won’t last forever, but I suspect rumours of its demise may be a little exaggerated. In this country, the government failed to stand up to the dominance of big internet companies like Facebook and Google that hoovered up digital advertising. Australia forced both to pay for the news they take from Australian newspapers.

The future of news matters. As print struggles, so do the skills involved in producing it. Respectable digital platforms still take care to check facts but the quality of editing online is generally poor. As there are no space restrictions online journalists are rapidly losing the ability to say things succinctly. What happened and why it matters is really all anyone needs to know.

Newspapers survived new technologies like radio and television by paying close attention to what readers wanted. Specialist writers would attract different communities: an aviation writer would attract travel and leisure industry readers; a good rugby section would attract rugby fans.

People want to read about themselves or things close to their own lives. That said, even those digital platforms holding on to specialist audiences are not safe. Not in their current form. The news business is fragmenting fast. Anyone can start a plausible specialist “publication” online now, however narrow their focus. Good writers try to start their own though doing it.

• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.