Law widens online paper role
Featured in The
West Australian, July
22, 2004
CATHY BOLT
The
chief executive of West Australian Newspapers Holdings,
Ian Law, yesterday expressed strong confidence in the
future of newspapers, just days before the company is
due to launch a full online edition of its flagship
daily, The West Australian.
Mr. Law also flagged further increases over time in The West Australian’s
advertising rates and cover price, arguing both were still cheap compared
to other major metropolitan newspapers in Australia.
“We are reasonably priced now and going forward we should be in a
position to increase our advertising rates at a reasonable rate,”
Mr. Law told an Institute of Company Directors luncheon in one of his
rare public addresses since taking up the job two and a half years ago.
Mr. Law, who has overseen double digit profit growth in that period, refused
to comment when asked later whether he had been approached about becoming
chief executive of the Fairfax group, publishers of the Sydney Morning
Herald and The Age, when Fred Hilmer retires next year.
“I’m just getting on doing what I am doing,”
he said.
After years of taking a highly cautious approach to Internet publishing,
Mr. Law confirmed the company planned to launch a subscriptionbased electronic
edition of The West Australian, which accounts for 91 per cent
of the company’s earnings, in the next couple of weeks.
The “Activ Paper” will be identical in appearance,
including the same advertisements. But it will cost
$4 a day, four times the cover price of the weekday
printed edition.
In a move to combat the leakage of employment and real estate advertising
to Internet sites, Mr. Law said it was also developing a website that
would offer all its employment, real estate and motoring advertising.
However that remained “some months away.”
He said some media groups had chosen to compete aggressively against their
own print products by selling online advertising. But WA Newspapers was
pursuing the “bundling” model of offering advertisers a free
or very low cost uplift to a website. Mr. Law said there would potentially
be more opportunities for mass market products like newspapers as a result
of the fragmentation in the media market flowing from developments like
the Internet, pay-TV, new FM licences, I-Pods, and mobile phones.
Advertising revenue for free-to-air television in the United States had
continued to climb despite a fall in their audience. “It means there
will be an ongoing need, possibly a greater need, for advertisers to have
access to mass marketing mediums,” he said.
Mr. Law was optimistic about the company’s trading environment for
the next two to three years, with WA increasingly seen as one of the longer-term
growth areas in Australia.
At the same time, every single process at the company
remained under scrutiny on a weekly basis, following
two years of hard work to curb cost increases.
“At the end of the day we are a manufacturing business
making widgets called newspapers,” he said.
The most difficult challenge facing newspapers was to
attract younger readers. But he said The West Australian
had been successful in growing its under-30 readership.
Though he had received complaints from some older readers about the prominent
placement of stories like those on English soccer celebrity David Beckham’s
infidelities, “the reality is that is news.”
“The West Australian can no longer be a
paper of record. It has to be entertaining, it has to
challenge, it has to deal with issues that this generation
is talking about.”
© 2004 West Australian Newspapers Limited
All Rights Reserved.