While newspaper companies in much of the world are retrenching in the face of the global slowdown and the migration of readers and advertising to the internet, the local unit of Swiss publishing giant Ringier is turning the conventional wisdom on its head by pledging to roll out a Sunday edition of its flagship property, daily Népszabadság. According to a piece on the recently-redesigned nol.hu – the website of the paper – the new edition could be out by March 1, under the direction of Péter József Martin, currently editor of business weekly Figyelő. The paper would be the first Sunday edition by a major paper in Hungary and, if my web-centric biases are proved correct, probably the last.
The announcement is weird not just because Ringier is tossing money at a print property whose circulation is on a clear downward path (in the last 15 years, its daily circ has dropped by more than 50%, to just over 100,000) and is probably headed farther downward, given that readers of such “political” dailies are most likely to figure out that ground-up tree trunks are not the best method for quickly transmitting information. It’s also strange because it mentions that the daily’s print and online employees are now working together, and that the new edition “may” share a sports and photo department with the weekday paper, as if these were radical developments in efficiency. Meanwhile, I couldn’t help but notice that the story announcing the new dead-tree product featured an embedded video.
On the bright side, the long-term prospects for a Sunday paper might be better than for the printed weekday Népszabi.
The company has apparently launched a tender for creating a brand for the Sunday paper. I’d suggest they just call it Vasárnapi Népszabadság and use the money they were going to spend on a fancy branding consultant to cover the losses that they will inevitably suffer if they keep pouring cash into a business that keeps getting smaller every day, seven days a week.