“Newspapers have focused on the wrong audience”

Photo: sxc.hu
Photo: sxc.hu

According to Robert Picard, professor of Media Economics at the University of Oxford, newspapers have made a strategic error by focusing on the wrong audience.

“Instead of creating added value for their core consumers, who really want news in newspaper form, they’ve tried to retain readers who have gradually been turning away from newspapers,” Robert Picard is quoted as saying by the newsletter from Holmen.


Lost readers are lost, it’s not worth chasing after them, Picard argues. Instead newspapers publishers need to focus on their core readership. These readers prefer news in printed form, presented with in-depth analysis.

“The target group must be given even more of this and it has to be information that is not offered free somewhere else“, he says.