Pakistan's news organisations, especially newspapers, need to change their business model of depending on the government of the day for their advertising revenue. This is a business model which should never have been followed to begin with. After all, which other private sector industry depends on government largesse (in the form of advertisements) as the print media does in Pakistan to make itself financially sustainable?
And the answer to that question may help explain why print, like just about everywhere else in the world, is a dying medium, being rapidly replaced by digital and social media. I worked in print media for 20 years in senior editorial positions (at Dawn, The News, and The Express Tribune), and therefore have a fair understanding of how it operates and what its business model has been. That business model is no longer sustainable; in fact, it stopped being sustainable many years ago, resulting in the closure of many newspapers or a rapid curtailment of their operations.
Some newspaper owners may want to continue with the print edition even if it is making a loss because they find value in having a nationally distributed newspaper in terms of using it to gain leverage with the government of the day, to gain favours for their other businesses, or to gain influence with the government for political gain. Either way, in this case, the decision to keep a newspaper going in print is not dependent on financial sustainability, and in fact, in most cases, the losses of the paper are covered by the other business enterprises that the owners have, including even the digital version of the newspaper.
They did this by cutting the number of pages, from 16 to 12 or even eight; by reducing the actual size of the page (to reduce the cost of importing newsprint); and by cutting staff salaries (yes, pay cuts, and to my knowledge at least twice in major national newspapers in the past ten years or so). With the advent of the digital age, the pivot needs to move away entirely from print.
The former model of strictly separating the two, while at the same time being heavily dependent on government advertising, does not work anymore
The expected damage to people’s livelihoods can be minimised if they are given the option to switch to digital within the same organisation. Unfortunately, in most cases, that is not feasible because for many, a switch from print to digital also comes with a switch in mindset, and that is not possible for many print journalists. In addition to that, there seems to be a preference to hire people who are themselves Generation Z, even though the value of such a decision, in terms of making digital websites profitable, at least in the case of Pakistan, is yet to be proven.
The digital model, which seems to work in Pakistan, is basically to charge for everything that is printed. Take the case of ProPakistani and Startup Pakistan, which seem to be the local go-to digital websites for brands and corporations if they want to get a press release or a story out to a wider audience. Every post is paid for, and everyone knows that, even the audience, but the brand or company which wants the information on those websites does not care about that, and neither does the audience. Interestingly, the same brand and/or company will frown if the same press release comes in a major newspaper but with a ‘sponsored’ label.
Major newspapers and their digital arms charge much more for such posts compared to ProPakistani or Startup Pakistan, and that is another reason why so many brands and companies are going with these two sites in particular. What should existing newspapers do if they want to remain in business?
They can switch entirely to digital, but that may not be what the owners want, since having a national newspaper, albeit with a falling audience, is still something that can be used to garner influence with the government of the day. Either way, they need to go heavy on digital and, in particular, on incorporating artificial intelligence and switching to more visual and video content. Most importantly, they need to adapt to the changing media landscape or risk being driven out of business.
The line between advertising and editorial, which is very clear in the case of a paper like Dawn but not there at all in the case of the digital websites mentioned above, needs to become a bit blurred, simply because the former model of strictly separating the two, while at the same time being heavily dependent on government advertising, does not work anymore, and that stream of revenue has dried up in recent years. Furthermore, expecting the government to give your paper advertisements comes across as being a bit hypocritical because while you are preventing your marketing from influencing editorial decisions, you are essentially allowing the government to do that instead.