UK Regional Newspapers

This is the third in our series of notes on UK newspapers and concerns regional newspapers. Unlike other media sectors, 2002 has got off to a positive start (as we predicted) due to resilience in newspaper advertising, particularly recruitment. This can deliver 25% plus of revenues. We expect recruitment to remain resilient, primarily due to continued government recruitment. As a result, we forecast 2-3% growth in advertising to this media sector in 2002.

But the overall conclusion of this report is that installing the infrastructure has, so far, changed very little. Old patterns of consumer behaviour largely remain. Three key points emerge. First, Internet behaviour is actually still very similar to Europe. Second, though wireless data use is rising, it is still a small fraction of voice usage. Popular data applications remain almost exclusively heavily focused on teenage ephemera, including ring tones, graphic messages and SMS/email. Third, the massive investment in digital TV capability, through satellite, terrestrial, cable and DSL is not being driven by consumer demand for High Definition TV. If South Korea is a good predictor of what is likely to happen in the rest of the world, the development of new content industries will continue to be slow and painful.