As reported by the News Media Association: Speaking on the Today programme on (last Friday), Mr Highfield said that people who have written off the industry have overlooked the fact that the industry is approaching a tipping point at which digital revenues cancel out print declines.
Speaking about the role of local press in a global news and information environment, Mr Highfield said: "I think at our best we are the glue that helps bind communities together. We provide news and information and entertainment for those communities.
“We can hold elected officials to account but perhaps most importantly we can champion local communities and then help local and increasingly national businesses reach those ever growing audiences across print and of course increasingly online.”
Mr Highfield said both print and online audiences for Johnston Press were up between 20 and 30 per cent during the election period.
Talking about industry trends, Mr Highfield said: “Newspaper sales will continue to decline but slowly and we’re seeing that rate of decline starting to level out and I think newspapers will be with us for a very long time.
Mr Highfield said that a lot of people preferred the “serendipity” and ease of picking up a printed newspapers. “Online, people go there for breaking news, traffic, travel, weather, football headlines, but in the paper they’ll sit back and read a more in depth article about a complicated planning permission or keeping the local hospital open, and so that’s why we’re finding, let’s say for families, they will both buy the paper and they’ll go online.
He continued: “So I would see, based on our own circulation numbers that we’ll be printing for decades to come because actually we print some quite small papers, just to continue with Yorkshire, papers like the Pocklington Post may only sell a few thousand but they are still profitable papers.”
Mr Highfield spoke about trends in the advertising market in the aftermath of the recession. “I think that since the recession we’ve certainly seen the market coming back and we are on an all out focus to get the business back to growth, growth in advertising revenues , and that will come when digital revenue growth outstrips any vestigial print revenue decline,” he said.
“Like the rest of the industry, we are getting to that tipping point and I think that’s probably been overlooked by many who thought that regional press was in terminal decline and that’s just not the case.”
“We are seeing the market coming back but it is led by digital. We at Johnston Press have got together with the other regional publishers to create an ad network, we’ve put all of our digital inventory in a great big bucket called 1XL and that’s starting to attract some national advertisers, the likes of Vodafone or Virgin or Tesco or Specsavers who might not have used us before, so actually the future, providing we can find the right ways of working together, is actually looking pretty good.”
