Do you think news content is getting thinner all the time? Well, now print media really is.
With the cost of newsprint — the grade of paper that your daily papers are printed on — doubling across Europe in the past year, some titles are cutting their page counts to save money.
Chief Executive Officer Jim Mullen conceded to Bloomberg that it was a "challenging market environment" but claimed that the general fall in newspaper circulation would counteract the price rise and reduce bills, along with efforts to hedge energy prices.
“It doesn’t put any risk to the future of print,” Mullen insisted, adding: “We are committed to print.”
But he said Reach PLC's targeted acquisitions were “primarily digital,” and that income from the group's legacy print side of the business was being invested in online media.
Palm Paper, the British subsidiary of German firm Germany’s Papierfabrik Palm GmbH, warned in October last year that the energy crisis — since deepened by Western nations' embargoes on Russian oil and gas imports — was driving the price increase.
The COVID-19 pandemic that reached the UK in early 2020 has hit the print media sector hard.
Millions of former commuters who switched working from home stopped picking up newspapers or magazines on their way to work, while cash-strapped businesses cut advertising spending.
The internet age has also seen a growing trend for titles to drop their print edition and go exclusively digital via websites and mobile device apps.
The Independent newspaper stopped printing in 2016 — although it still publishes its lightweight sister-tile the i, aimed at students — while arts listings and review magazine Time Out announced it was doing the same in April this year.