Since finishing with full time work, my Monday morning routine is much the same. Get up, head to the Co-op to purchase my newspaper and then spend the morning carrying out some domestic functions, whilst from time to time consuming far too much coffee than is good for me, whilst reading the paper. Today is no different.
Squeezing between the scores of mums driving that exhausting 400 yards from their homes to the local primary school, I picked out my Guardian and took it to the counter. There are seldom more than four or five Guardians in my local shop so I am rarely having to rue an early morning sell out. Anyway, I took my copy to the young assistant who scanned the bar code and said: “Blimey, £2 is a lot for a newspaper.” I could hardly say that it wasn’t because it’s a hell of a lot of money. The Guardian’s Sunday paper costs a quid more than that so you do the maths. Over a year, you could afford a short holiday with that sort of money.
I pay a lot less than the cover price because I pay a standing order for coupons, but it’s still a hefty sum and I have to say that I am reaching the end of the line with my newspaper buying habit.
The Guardian is not a profit making company, it’s a loss-making trust and a heavy loss-making trust at that. It’s gone up today from £1.80 to £2.00 and this will not be the last increase.
Newspapers are dying. That is a simple fact. Few young people buy newspapers because they were brought up with the internet where all the news is free, so why pay? My adherence to paper is, as much as anything, habitual. Most young people do not feel the need for a hard copy any more than they require hard copies of their music.
The Independent, it wasn’t, has already gone. Shorn of advertising revenue, which is all moving on line, its owners were unwilling to subsidise the cost of a paper edition and it’s now moved on line behind a pay wall. There were good journalists at the Independent and despite the owner’s decision to tell us to vote Tory last year, it was far from being a right wing scandal sheet. It is no longer on the High Street and behind a pay wall from my point of view it might as well not exist.
It will not require a skilled mathematician to work out that the Guardian is ultimately doomed. £2 is a lot for a newspaper and there comes a time when you think to yourself, enough is enough. I am almost there.
I love the Guardian, mostly. It’s writers, uniquely for British newspapers, do not tell me what to think, the paper does not deal exclusively in tittle-tattle. Much of it is of interest to me. But much of it isn’t of interest to me. Some of it is aimed at a niche audience with educational and social services supplements and lots and lots about business and economics. As a confirmed Guardian addict, there is a lot of the paper I just don’t want and I just don’t read. The Saturday edition is fragmented beyond belief and half to it goes in the recycling box without a glance.
It’s sister paper, the Observer, is a joy to me. It is the highlight of my Sunday to read the main section, the sports section and the excellent specialist magazines like Food, Music or Tech, but there is an entire section, The New Review, which is a collection of long reads about things I could not care less about. Again, it must appeal to a particular reader but I’ll bet there are plenty like me who see it as a waste of paper. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that the papers know and rely upon their existing loyal audience and choose not to rock the boat. Perhaps this is the only way to survive, by trying to maintain the existing audience because there is no new audience out there. That is how I see the basis of how the Guardian operates.
Perhaps there is no future for the printed word. Once the legion of those who are currently middle aged and older have popped their clogs, I do not see a new generation of Mail and Express readers coming along to replace them.
The future is on line and the future is going to be free, as the Sun discovered when they hid behind a pay wall and found that no one was interested in paying them.
I truly hope that newspapers are able to survive in the brave new world of digital technology, in the same way that books have, so far, managed to co-exist with Kindles and the like, but I fear the worst. Not today, not tomorrow, but someday soon the word newsagent will be a thing of the past. I will miss newspapers but I may well bail out first.
