Inky hands trembled at newspaper printers nationwide last month when Tim Brooks, managing director of Guardian News & Media (GNM), told MediaWeek that he would never launch another printed product.

　　And at Publishing Expo last week, his message showed no sign of dilution. Speaking at The Future of Newspapers seminar at the event, he said: The days when you can trade in just words are gone. As an organisation, our future will be in creating far more audio and video. It’s what keeps people coming back.

　　A month prior to his  MediaWeek comments, Brooks’ organisation – consisting of The Guardian, The Observer and guardian.co.uk – completed a £100m move to a development in Kings Place, London.

　　These new offices are geared towards Brooks’ multimedia vision for the organisation, boasting world-class facilities for producing videos, podcasts and online content. It is a move that is in keeping with the ongoing transformation of the newspaper product and one that comes at a time when the media, in Brooks’ words, faces its worst year ever.

　　No place for print?

　　The multi-channel age, where news is demanded minute-by-minute through a variety of media, will, according to some, spell the end for the printed product.

　　A Pew Research Center study, undertaken in the US – which Brooks believes is a good indicator of how the UK market will develop – highlights a continued decline in newspaper readership. It also shows that the younger a
person is, the less likely they are to have read a newspaper in the last 24 hours.

　　Brooks reflects on this transition with little nostalgia for the print.  He says: In the 1970s, there were only two places a music fan

　　could read a review, Melody Maker or NME. Nowadays, there are countless sources online. What’s more, launching a magazine is expensive, whereas you can set up a digital product from your kitchen.

　　People who talk about the physical qualities of a paper product remind me of those who still talk about LP re­­cords. This generation is a digital generation.

　　Guardian.co.uk is at the forefront of this new age, with 26m unique users per month and rising. However, while the website is a profitable medium for news, it has not helped GNM in terms of fiscal profits – the group has not made any money so far this decade.

　　One solution that frequently arises, and is just as frequently discounted, is to charge people to use the website.

　　Brook says: Such a move would result in a 90% drop in readership and we would go out of business. There’s no foreseeable scenario where we would ask people to pay to use the site.

　　Benefits of online

　　There are also issues for print advertising. Brooks warns that sales models in conventional print markets are being attacked by online markets, with the latter being more accountable.

　　But GNM is in the fortunate position of not needing profitability to be its number one priority. The organisation is owned by the Scott Trust, whose sole purpose is to invest in the quality of The Guardian. 

　　Brooks encourages this kind of support, praising the Trust, as well as other people that support the industry, including his direct rivals.

　　He says: Rupert Murdoch gets a bad press, but he is a benefactor of serious journalism, so hats off to him.

　　The quality press, in aggregate, is not profitable. It (the business model) doesn’t make any sense and there are issues for the plurality of news.

　　Digital investments

　　Understandable, then, that the Scott Trust is avoiding investment in ink and paper. Brooks says: It is an amazing sight seeing The Guardian being printed, but the investment is a huge one. The price of the printed product will rise too, it will have to. We will never launch another newspaper and all future investments will be digital.

　　While newspaper markets in regions such as Latin America and south-east Asia continue to flourish, here in the West, launching a newspaper would just be a waste of time and money. Newspapers still have a long future, but there will be fewer of them and the people who buy them, those that grew up in a print culture, are dying out.

　　Brooks points to a culture of brand loyalty when it comes to buying newspapers. You have a core set of people who usually buy your newspaper. Surrounding that core are a number of people who quite like your newspaper, or don’t mind it, and when they are reminded that it is actually quite good, that it has that funny columnist or excellent reporter, they will buy it again.

　　We have heard the death knell of newspapers before. GNM may not be planning to launch any new printed products, but you can rest assured it will do its utmost to protect its existing newspapers. The only question is whether they retain their flagship status.