The Australian: Newspaper executives spent this week in Cairns trying to solve their industry’s greatest challenge: How to make their 400-year old product relevant to the iPod generation. Delegates to the Pacific Area Newspaper Publishers Association conference heard about several success stories amid a 50-year circulation decline.
David Armstrong, editorial director of the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post and former editor-in-chief of The Australian, noted that Asian newspapers were bucking the trend. He said sales of Chinese newspapers had grown by more than 80 per cent since 1990 to a circulation of 40 billion copies. India outstripped that with 45,000 newspaper titles selling about 50 billion copies annually.
“The common thread in much of Asia is that newspapers are completely focused on their readers,” he said. “[They] don’t seem to be bogged down by preconceptions of what a newspaper should be. So they are prepared to do things differently.”
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