The globalization of media
One of the trends we’ve seen in investment banking over the last two or three years is what PWC calls the ‘global war for talent’. Local banks in rich emerging market countries have more money to spend than their troubled rivals on Wall Street, so they’re hiring the top talent from western banks to join them.
We’re seeing a similar process slowly occurring in the media. Western media are in financial trouble. Sales at every American national newspaper except the Wall Street Journal and USA Today are on a long-term downwards trajectory. The same is true in the UK, with the exception of The Sun and The Observer, whose circulations are slightly rising.
Papers are being undercut by sites like Google News and Yahoo News, and by free rags like Metro and London Lite, which have skeleton editorial staffs and rely on recycling press releases and paparazzi photos.
However, in the emerging markets, the story is much rosier. The World Association of Newspapers says that in India, daily newspaper sales rose by 33% between 2001 and 2005, while in China, circulation rose by 28% between 2000 and 2004.
As the Guardian’s media section noted last year:
The seemingly inexorable decline of the newspaper in Europe and, more dramatically, in North America sometimes makes the industry sound doomed, regardless of its heavy online presence.
Overall, however, global newspaper sales are on the increase, a fact which is all too often ignored by gloomy commentators in the West, who need only look eastwards when optimism is in short supply at home.
That means western media firms are now targeting markets like India and China. Journalists at The Times, for example, were told to keep the Indian market in mind while writing web stories (how does one do this exactly? Describe the new budget as ‘pukka’?) The Sun, The Independent and The Daily Mail have all launched joint ventures in India in the last 12 months.
But it also means local media firms having the capital to attract western journalists onto their staff for English language ventures. This often involves quite serious culture clashes, and the results can be quite comic. (more…)