Al-Madina

IF you have traveled on London’s Metro, then you might have noticed the colorful newspaper in glossy print and with no less than 50 pages, which is distributed free of charge at all metro stations.

Readers are attracted to this newspaper. The first thing a person will notice in this newspaper is its rich and diverse content. This disproves the common belief that the end of the print media is close by.

Not many print newspapers suffer these days the way many people tend to claim. There are powerful newspapers that will definitely last for a lot more time to come.

The idea is not in distributing the print newspaper for free. Most of the newspapers in Europe and in the UK offer their printed editions to the readers for free anyway. The real attraction is in the newspaper’s powerful content.

This newspaper includes exclusive content that the reader is searching for and cannot find elsewhere. This is what makes a newspaper to stand out and attract readers, irrespective of whether it is published in print or electronically. It is about what you provide the reader with and not how you provide it.

In France, the content of print newspapers is strong. The sale of the print newspapers has been on the rise there with the support of electronic editions. The respected French daily Le Monde recorded a 5.6 percent growth in sales in 2017, which indicates that newspapers will not die a certain death in the near future. What has ended was the traditional and old method of dealing with the news, which is what the newspapers that are struggling for survival still follow. They do not cater to the readers’ needs and are not in touch with them. No doubt, the readers will abandon such newspapers for good. Radio broadcasting was not done away with when TV channels invaded the airwaves, simply because they have transformed to provide new and attractive content. As for radio stations that did not change with technology, they simply ended up in the museums.

Albert Einstein once said insanity is in doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. The newspaper industry and its readers are in a critical stage of transition. Survival is no longer the privilege of the financially strong, but of those who are quick and smart, who can keep pace with the digital age and who understand the demands of the readers.

The daily newspapers that are dying are the ones that could not rehabilitate themselves in today’s market and they die not because they are printed newspapers.

It makes me sad to say that most of the solutions that are being applied by our print newspapers are useless. It is a losing battle because they report news that was already broadcast and analyzed on TV channels, which are indeed quicker in reaching their audiences.

There is a strange and unexplained negligence when it comes to the investigative journalism and analyses of news that concerns society. The main issue here is content and how the content is disseminated. Our newspapers, if they want to survive, should think about developing their content. Only attractive and exclusive content will guarantee their survival.