They will be told that they have done some great work, and have reached and breached all their KPIs and goals, and have done a terrific job under stressful circumstances. They will always then be told that unfortunately, the sales and advertising teams have come nowhere near their targets, so editorial resources are going to be slashed again and the news team will need to do that same great job under the new conditions. They will need to do more with less.
There is probably a scientific equation that shows the impossibility of 'doing more with less', but you only have to look at the general deterioration in the quality of the product to see it for yourself.
Advertising has been coming up short for a long time now and the failure of a publication to rack up enough ads has been blamed on a lot of things in those years. For a long time the global financial collapse was used as a catch-all excuse for falling revenues, and the continued rise of the internet in the 21st century - and the continued expectation that all content should be free - hasn't helped matters, especially with the hoovering up of valuable bucks by tech giants like Google and Facebook.
It all contributes to that fall in advertising, and the accompanying spiral of a decline in overall quality and actual readership.
Still, as bad as things have been, there was always the hope that content that was strong enough would always attract the money; that if the end product was noticeably gaining an audience on the strength of its own writing, and did things like keeping a local focus, it would inevitably find advertising support.
But that hope took a kick in the fuckin' teeth this month with the revelation Paperboy would no longer be published.
An unashamedly Auckland publication, Paperboy had some strong writing and genuinely useful guides to local restaurants and attractions. It was properly multi-cultural in a way mainstream magazines rarely are, and had some surprisingly meaty articles. None of which helped it last more than a year.
There might be several reasons why Paperboy went bust - maybe Simon Wilson is right and it just needed to be a bit snarkier and get some gritty reviews in there - but the central reason given by the publisher still rings true: it just couldn't get the advertising to cover its costs.
Which is pretty fucking alarming, because Paperboy had huge readership and name recognition among some primo demographics - young people with loads of disposable income in the country's biggest city all read it, it was in all the inner city cafes and available wherever there was public transport. They printed 100k every time, and the display cases on the street were often running dry of new copies within a day or so, so they were certainly getting picked up and read.
And the advertising crew at Bauer still couldn't convince anybody to throw some advertising dough their way. And if it couldn't, what will?
The concerns about the revenue shortfall in news media companies has been building for years now, but it really feels like it's all about to come to a head. With the failure of the StuffMe merger, publishers shitting their pants over Facebook's latest moves and continued concerns at almost every publication in the country, the folding of Paperboy is a heavy suggestion that 2018 is going to be the year the shit really hits the fan, and it's going to get fucking everywhere.
All we can do is close our mouths and hold our breaths until it settles. Happy new year!
- Steve Lombard
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