At the exchange4media Conclave yesterday, Ashish Bagga, CEO of the Living Media (India Today) Group sounded a warning to those who don’t look beyond print: “though print is growing, if you look at the advertising projections for the next 10 years, sure, it’s going to grow, but its it going to grow the way it grew? There are other media forms, including mobile, and telco’s are looking to address the advertising potential. Advertising revenues for print are increasing, but it’s increasing at a decreasing rate. The moment you reailze that gross margins are 25 percent, 23 percent, 20 percent - what’s the trend? If we don’t sow the seeds of investment for the next generation, we have a problem on our hands.” He also said that sometimes existing resources cannot be leveraged online - saying that “traditional print journalists cannot work for the web. They’re just not relevant.” More in the audio below.

Some other comments from Bagga during the discussion that followed (and not in the audio):

On Interactivity And User Generated Content
Print and digital will feed off each other. When experts sit down and analyse a perspective with strong views, people are bound to react. This triggers off more debate and more content. Print can’t offer this interactivity. With user generated content, you tend to stimulate the discussion - more engagement, more stickiness, and that will drive advertising. UGC - very important, Editors engaging with users - extremely important, and credibility of editors and journalists put together will outweigh bias of other influences. User generated content needs to be separate from editorial content, and it’s up to you to decide what you choose.

Print And Mobile
I was given a demo of a newspaper and a magazine that has a barcode, which every article has a barcode, using your mobile phone, takes you to the article or the ad in the mobile phone, and takes you to the website. (Ed: He’s probably referring to the QR code)
Print is there to stay and a print-digital combination can become a big force.

Websites as modes of judging editorial performance
It’s been difficult for the management to rate editors and journalists. On a newspapers website, the amount of engagement over stories that are measurable. So you can see how many page views, and putting a payment model around it.