Mubarak Ali Al Mansouri is one of several men seated by the floor of the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange reading the paper.
“I read five or six newspapers every morning,” he says. “I’ll never stop.”
But, unlike Mr Al Mansouri, seven out of 10 Middle East readers are likely to reduce or cease reading newspapers altogether over the next two years, according to a recent report from Booz & Company, the management consultancy. This poses a serious threat to the region’s newspaper publishers, argues the report author Jayat Bhargava, a principal at the company.
Changing consumer behaviour, rapid technological innovation and a dearth of advertising revenues have combined to cast a pall of gloom over the newspaper industry worldwide.
Until now, the Arab world has been partially insulated from these forces, as advertising revenues have remained relatively robust.
But this is rapidly changing, as consumers connect to a new Middle Eastern digital “ecosystem” of news providers, says Mr Bhargava.
“You need companies like Google, Facebook, digitally savvy ad agencies, digital content distributors, and … a community of technical people and talent,” he says, “in order to build the digital economy.”
Now that the region’s digital economy is in full swing, its youth are growing up with Facebook and WhatsApp, instead of the newspaper their parents read.
“Advertising is moving online because youth is the target audience,” said Maha Sidahmed, who teaches PR and media classes at Murdoch University Dubai.
“The older demographic [of Arab readers] sits around with a cup of coffee, today’s newspaper, and talks politics,” says Ms Sidahmed. “They were brought up in a culture where you get news from your father and grandfather, who go through all the headlines one by one.
“It’s dying off in the younger generation,” she says. “Today we have RSS feeds – which makes us very selective about what we want to read. We read only what attracts us.”
“It’s a cultural shift … there’s no loyal readership any more.”
This is also changing how new journalism students are taught at Murdoch University Dubai. “We require them to be multi-talented – they have to be able to write, take a picture, shoot video, and do basic sound editing,” says Ms Sidahmed.
“You have to find sources quicker, get information out there quicker – or lose the readership.”
As young Arabs put down newspapers and pick up their smartphones, advertisers are flocking to follow them.
But they’re also spending less overall. In short, the ways “newspapers used to make money – from traditional advertising and circulation revenues – are [both] expected to decline in the future,” says Mr Bhargava.
So what can Arab publishers do to survive in a world of shrinking revenues and changing consumer habits?
“TV didn’t kill radio, and instant coffee didn’t kill coffee,” says Gina Johnson, editorial director at Motivate, a Dubai-based publishing company.
To survive, Arab publishers have to embrace digital wholeheartedly, think long and hard about what type of media company they want to be, and work out what they can do better than anyone else. That’s the argument made by Booz in its report.
Motivate’s strategy is to adopt a “very explicitly regional focus”, says Ms Johnson.
This goes hand in hand with publishing on a variety of media. Publishing companies need to be “agnostic” about their choice of platforms, she says.
“We’ve learnt not to kill off one channel for another,” said Ms Johnson. “You can have a very strong brand that can resonate with readers across multiple platforms.”
Flexibility, she says, is critical. “If you were a publishing company incapable of being agile, you’d go extinct.
“Today, you consume information across multiple platforms,” said Ajit Ramaswami, managing director of LeoComm, a public relations company.
“[Publishers] have to start with the idea, not with the channel. If you start with the channel, you’re going to get things wrong,” says Mr Ramaswami. “[Social media] shouldn’t be a fashion statement, it should meet a business objective.”
Mr Bhargava thinks that Arab publishers need to go further.
Digital transformation alone is “not sufficient to replenish the economic value that [publishers] lose” from print’s decline, he says.
He argues that media companies need to identify what he calls “adjacencies” – business areas that take advantage of a firm’s skill sets and assets to generate new revenues.
“Most successful publishers in developed markets went through this journey, which included diversification into adjacent areas,” he says. “Many expanded their revenue base and grew.”
It’s not always easy for media companies to identify underutilised assets and new sources of revenue, however. As Ms Johnson says: “That’s dangerous – you could lose the rifle-shot of focus... [and] you could be competing against experts in that field.”
“Content is still king,” says Mr Ramaswami. “If you have the right content, it will [get] across.”
“Radio adapted after television arrived,” he says. “The whole thing is about evolution, but you’ve got to see at what pace. If you don’t evolve, and you’re stagnant, you’ll disappear.”
Ms Johnson highlights the fate of Newsweek, an American periodical. In 2012, its editor announced that print copies would no longer be sold. But, the next year, after Newsweek was sold to IBT Media, the new owners reversed course and decided to sell physical copies of the magazine once more. This illustrates print’s resilience, argues Ms Johnson.
“It’s not that newspapers aren’t useful and loved – just that the sector is smaller than it has ever been,” Ms Johnson says.
As the day’s trading progresses, the floor of the stock exchange is filling up with elderly Emirati men reading Arabic-language newspapers.
“[With] newspapers, you can feel the news,” says Mr Al Mansouri, who is sitting next to a mound of papers. Then he points towards his iPhone 5S, and says, “But I also sometimes tweet about it.”
abouyamourn@thenational.ae
