For generations of journalists, life at the afternoon daily NRC Handelsblad was as warm and comfortable as a Dutch kitchen. The Netherlands' young burghers signed up for a home subscription when they got their first jobs and reluctantly let their subscriptions lapse when they died. If you were fortunate enough to work there as a journalist, you never had to worry about looking for another job. If there wasn't enough space for a particular subject, the paper simply added a supplement.
That world ended in 2000, when circulation at the Rotterdam-based paper peaked at around 270,000. Young readers stopped signing up. Circulation fell quickly; it's now approximately 220,000, and falling 5,000 to 10,000 a year. "We asked ourselves, 'Is this the end?'" says Hans Nijenhuis, then foreign editor at the newspaper.
As it happens, it was just the beginning. In March 2006, Handelsblad launched NRC Next, a splashy morning digest of the afternoon paper's best stuff, plus its own analysis and features written by a staff of young journalists. Nijenhuis, who became NRC Next's editor, thinks of it less as a daily paper than a daily magazine aimed directly at Handelsblad's lost generation of rich young readers. At one euro, the skinny NRC Next is only two-thirds the price of Handelsblad, but it looks and feels way cooler — the paper it's printed on, for instance, is slightly heavier. "Readers have got to feel that this is better than Holland's four free dailies — better even than Handelsblad — or this isn't going to work," says Nijenhuis.
Finding things that work is on every publisher's and editor's mind these days. The situation in Europe is not quite as dire as it is in the U.S., where plunging profits, shrinking staff numbers and bankruptcies are now all commonplace. But Europe's newspapers are struggling just the same. Investment guru (and owner of a big chunk of the Washington Post Co.) Warren Buffett saw this coming. In 2006, he explained the depressing law of newspaper gravity at a meeting of his Berkshire Hathaway Corp.: "Newspaper readers are heading into the cemetery, while nonnewspaper readers are just getting out of college. It's hard to make money buying a business that's in permanent decline." Here's how three of Europe's newspaper firms are trying to prove the sage of Omaha wrong:
Younger, Sexier
No one's denying the grimness of newspaper arithmetic. But, like editor Nijenhuis and his colleagues at NRC Handelsblad, some are fighting back with clever reinventions of the format. Take NRC Next, which editorially is a mixed bag of analysis and fun. You may get a recycled profile of Barack Obama; if it's good on Tuesday, why shouldn't it be just as good on Wednesday? During a big soccer championship you might find a daily photo of a hunky player with an appraisal of his physique by Next's female staffers. What you won't find much of is news. "Our readers know the news already," says Nijenhuis. "When there's a general strike in France, our readers are seeing it on the Net at the same time the NRC Handelsblad reporter is covering it."
When it launched, NRC Next gave itself a goal of 80,000 daily readers in three years. NRC claims the paper's selling about 10,000 over that mark and that it made a profit of about $3.3 million on sales of $25 million in 2008. "Newspapers are so conservative, and now they're panicking, saying they've got to cut quality, cut costs," says Nijenhuis. "We say that's exactly what you don't do."
Why is such innovation coming out of Europe, so often dismissed as bereft of new business thinking? There are several reasons but foremost is competition. The U.S. newspaper landscape is a patchwork of one-newspaper towns. Profits are traditionally sky-high — margins run to 30% in some cases — and so is resistance to change. By contrast, Europe is a bloody battleground of national dailies, all clawing at one another. Competition breeds creativity, not to mention a willingness to live with slimmer profits. "The U.S. lost the beat on newspapers around the year 2000," says Vin Crosbie, a partner at media-consulting firm Digital Deliverance and the fifth generation of a Connecticut newspaper-owning family. "I'm just amazed that most U.S. newspapers update their websites once a day. In Norway, if there's a car crash, they update the whole paper."
Online or Dead
It's no accident Crosbie mentions Norway. That's the home of Verdens Gang, or VG, an Oslo-based afternoon daily often cited as a model for how to thrive in the brave new newspaper world. VG is owned by Schibsted, a media conglomerate that embraced the Net early and rode out seven years of heavy losses before getting it right. The stock market wanted CEO Kjell Aamot's head, and Schibsted's board was fully prepared to give it to them. Only Tinius Nagell-Erichsen, the revered former chairman who controlled the Schibsted family's trust, said no. Now VG's website, VG.no, is Norway's biggest destination, period. In 2007 VG Nett, the paper's online arm, had pretax earnings of $23.4 million on revenues of $55 million, up 44% over 2006 and accounting for just over a third of VG's total profits. Online ad revenue is also over a third of VG's total. That's simply unheard of for most newspapers.
There's an ancient, hand-cranked printing press in Schibsted's spanking modern lobby. Founder Christian Schibsted used this press to print his first newspapers in the mid-1800s. It stands as a poignant reminder not just of where the newspaper is coming from but where it's going. In the first nine months of 2008, the print version of the newspaper sold 290,000 copies a day on average, down 21,500 from the same period in 2007. Daily readership of the newspaper alone has dropped by close to half since 1997. Two years ago, in what seems a surprising lack of team spirit, the VG Nett folks strung a triumphal banner across their offices when online readership surpassed print readership: "Storre enn mor!" (Bigger than my mom!)