With print circulations in continuous decline across the UK and the Independent only weeks away from printing its final edition, conversations about the future of journalism are usually gloomy.
But to publisher and editor of the Hackney Citizen, Keith Magnum, the future of the industry looks bright.
Last Friday, Mr Magnum’s company expanded its reach by launching a new print title. The East End Citizen is a free monthly newspaper that will be available throughout the borough of Tower Hamlets.
“It’s been in the pipeline for a very long time,” Mr Magnum, 49, explains: “The idea has been there for five years but we’ve grown recently so we have just about enough capacity now”.
Renewed hope for print newspapers?
East End Citizen – a new independent paper for Tower Hamlets, in print monthly and online: https://t.co/qHLshynowb pic.twitter.com/hDiJgNCYsu
— East End Citizen (@eastendcitizen) March 5, 2016
The East End Citizen will have a review section that will be shared with the Hackney paper– which estimates its own circulation at 30,000 a month– supplanting the arts-focused East End Review, which Magnum’s company also runs.
But how has the Citizen been able to expand when revenues for most print titles are plummeting? Magnum does his best to share credit.
“[It’s] mostly luck. Hackney was a good borough to try it in. It has the readers that are interested in our kind of stories. And it has the advertisers. It’s quite unusual in that way,” he said.
The Citizen’s business model is based on targeting well-educated middle-class readers in the borough. You get a sense of the target demographic by looking at the hipster cafes and fashionable delis on the distribution list of the Hackney Citizen.
For Magnum, the way the paper is distributed is an important part of the business model.
“If you’re a paid-for-publication and you have a circulation of say 5,000, you’ll usually get the same 5,000 people picking up the paper every week. So you only ever reach ten or fifteen thousand people, if you assume two or three people are looking at every copy.
“But if you’re a free paper and you have more of a scattergun distribution, different people are picking up the paper at different places. So your advertisers are reaching more eyeballs; different eyeballs every month.”
Another reason that the Citizen has been successful and distinct is the monthly release of the paper. Mr Magnum says that being a monthly publication allows them to write more in-depth stories. This means that the paper misses out on the “someone got stabbed” stories and therefore cannot compete with the weekly Hackney Gazette on hard news.
“Obviously we struggle with breaking news,” accepts Mr Magnum, “so we tend to do stories that have some longevity – things like community campaigns, where we’re tracking them over a period of time, whether it be months or years.”
Mr Magnum talks about the website almost as an afterthought. When the paper launched in 2008, it was a print-only operation.
Slowly, as the number of stories began to increase, it made sense for them to be put them online and now the publication’s web and social media presence is important to the business.
But in terms of advertising revenues, Magnum says it is still easier to sell print ads than online.
“Local advertisers are much more comfortable with a big print ad; a paper they can see and feel,” he said.
For the first edition of the new 24-page paper, 10,000 copies were printed which included adverts from the University of East London, Sadler’s Wells Theatre and local businesses.
Plans for growth
So with strong advertising revenue and the scope for growth, investing in expansion seemed like the logical next step. The Citizen doesn’t make a profit. But any money it does make goes into growth: hiring new freelance reporters or expanding the business.
“We’re trying to grow so it would be silly to take the money out. We can’t grow unless we invest”.
It is not a given that the East End Citizen will be as successful as its neighbour; after all, Tower Hamlets is a very different borough to Hackney.
But having done a soft launch in November, publishing stories of a similar style to the Hackney paper, Mr Magnum is confident that there is an audience for the Citizen’s output in Tower Hamlets.
“The readership is there in Bethnal Green and Whitechapel, Bow and Spitalfields.”
Whatever the explanation for the publication’s success, Mr Magnum’s claim that it is mostly down to luck seems unlikely.
“[Our success] is counter to what everyone’s been saying about the death of print. It may well be that it will eventually happen to us, but our sales year on year are up and our sales month on month are up”.
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