The trend of national newspapers with local state content is continuing. News Corp in its major newspapers is now nationally rolling out three new lifestyle lift outs.

These sections will be added to the existing local state newspapers.

From the newsagents view, it is a step forward. The sections look good. One is on recipes, restaurant and wine reviews, another section is a guide to TV shows, gadgets and technology, and the last is an entertainment guide. I am sure they will be popular.

What News Corp want, I suspect is all state newspapers will be national papers with local sections. It is both saves money as it is much cheaper to produce one newspaper than many, and it is easier to sell advertising nationally, if you have one newspaper.

In view of its current importance, we have decided to rerun the training course on advanced billing.

Our software has many excellent facilities to help newsagents who wish to do advanced billings.

It is a major change in the current News Corp contract for advanced billing for newspapers. It is expected that in a few months this will be the standard billing system used by newsagents. It means that you can be paid in advance by the customer, so there are no bad debts because papers are only delivered only if already paid. All our systems can handle advanced billing. Both have the inbuilt word processing and mail merge required by News Corp to notify your clients of the change.

We are holding user meetings next Thursday to explain the mechanics of how to do this advanced billing. An expert from our support team will be attending so you can ask all your difficult questions.

VANA have what should be a very good meeting coming up with

Andrew Hockley-General Manager: Sales & Marketing and Stephen Kaye-Circulation Director from The Herald & Weekly Times

talking on HWT publications, their future plans and the process of newsagency involvement.

It should be a topic of great to many newsagents.

It will be on

Tuesday - 16th February 2010

If you have any topics or issues you would like asked or you want to know more details please contact Alicia Carmichael on
Telephone: 03 9482 2911

I suspect the questions from newsagents will be more interesting than the talk.

Advanced billing for newspapers is a significant change in the current News Corp contract. It is expected that in a few months, this will be the standard billing system used by newsagents. It means that you can be paid in advance by the customer, so there are no bad debts because papers are only delivered only if already paid. All our systems can handle advanced billing. Both have the inbuilt word processing and mail merge required by News Corp to notify your clients of the change.

We are holding user meetings next Thursday to explain the mechanics of how to do this advanced billing. An expert from our support team will attend so you can ask all your difficult questions.

Here is a tip if you use XChangeIT.

Please make sure that you have XChangeIT usernames and passwords readily available. You will need them in the new XChangeIT to resending invoices. We have had several people who have had to call XChangeIT to get these items.

News Corps latest offer to newsagents does have one very good plus. News Corps are allowing advanced billing. My feeling is that this advanced billing will be extended further over time, into a newspapers subscription model.

From the retailers’ view, it is a good step forward. You are paid in advance by the customer so there are no bad debts because papers are only delivered if paid.

Both DOS and Windows systems can handle advanced billing. Both have inbuilt word processing and mailing to notify your clients of the change.

We are holding next week's user meetings for both Windows and DOS to explain how to do it.

The latest update for our software has a new button in the “Convert XchangeIt EDI” section of Stock Received, called “Check New”. Clicking this button will check for any new invoices that have arrived, and process them automatically. This eliminates the need to go into the XchangeIT document and import the invoices separately! You can now import and process all of your XchangeIT invoices through one section of PosBrowser!

Regards
Garth

Beginning today, several newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. empire have stopped the free search engines and will presumably move towards paid online content. See here.

According to this study done recently in the US, the readership of paid online content is only about 2.4% of print subscribers. However, those that are willing to pay for online content seem to be largely indifferent towards how much it costs. Click here for a report on this study

Since Fairfax has also stated that it in moving in this direction, it will be interesting to see what the Australia consumer does as these pay walls are erected, and Australians are being asked to pay for online news.

Note several local news organisations like the ABC have stated that they are not going to this model. There maybe some movement to print.

Tomorrow Tuesday, 12th January 2010, once the last of the invoices are sent that afternoon the old XchangeIT platform will be shut permanently.

The count-down has begun

There are probably about 60 newsagents left who are about to be shut out of XChangeIT because they have not updated. Over the past few months we have called, emailed, blogged and faxed everyone repeatedly we can think of. No doubt we will get many calls after the shutdown.

If anyone has any questions or comments please call me.

Since I wrote about the new computers coming out now with the improved screen.

If you are unsure what they look like, here is a demonstration by Microsoft on these new computers that are being released now. That are called tablet or slate computers.

This is a magazine displayed on one of these new computers.

{links were removed}

One of the big highlights now are e-readers. More than forty companies now have e-readers all promising competition to the Amazon Kindle and the Sony e-reader. Clearly a flood of e-readers is on the way to Australia. Going by past experience Australian being rapid absorbers will take them much quicker than the US.

Much of the interest in the e-reader is because many newspaper and magazine companies are looking to the e-reader like the Messiah that is going to save them from the internet. Once their readers get e-reader, these readers will take out subscriptions then they will have revenue without the expense of publishing and the cost the intermediary (the newsagent).

I do not think it will happen. The real competitor to an e-reader is a computer. Essentially an e-reader is a limited computer with an improved screen for reading. As these improved screens get generally released, almost every computer will be an e-reader. These computers will be able to access free material just like now.

So I believe the problem of ebooks is much bigger and more immediate then most.

The next New Idea will start to show its new look with its greater stress on food, health, family and the home. To promote this new look New Idea is making a campaign which includes TV. Newsagents will be supplied point-of-sale support such as counter-packs, posters and display units.

It is good timing as Marie Claire seems to have generated mixed results in shops and maybe some women annoyed about Jennifer Hawkins will try New Idea.

It will be interesting to see if it works.

A couple of people reported getting double invoices in their XChangeIT today. Although we have not determined the cause, please manually check XChangeIT invoices before importing.

I went to read the English Financial Times and discovered this.

Some newspapers overseas are now turning to the new subscription model where online reading is no longer free.

Here is a local example, the Examiner a Fairfax newspaper

It will be interesting to see how it spreads to mainstream newspapers.

Several people today asked me what week number to use for network. Apparently, no-one was available at network to answer the question.

There is some confusion on whether today was week 52 for 28/12/2009 or week 1 if dated from today.

Network return weeks start from 1st January; on the 1st January, they get reset. We are now in network week 1.

For this year, network week will be Friday to Thursday.

The “old” XchangeIT is going to be turned off today. If you have not updated it yet, it no longer works. To update it, an information sheet is available here.

Telephone: 1300 551 212

As in previous years, some newspapers will be publishing special Bumper Editions over the New Year. Please click the links here   (Outdated file - decommissioned) to view instructions on how to set these up.

Regards

Garth

Queensland Newsagents Federation and the Newsagents Association of NSW & ACT have made a submission to the Treasury, for their members on the current newspaper contracts. This comment that I thought was a good statement of some problems that newsagents face now.

Newsagents are small businesses and face major suppliers such as newspaper publishers, magazine publishers / distributors, suppliers of soft gambling products and landlords.

Conduct that newsagents regularly experience includes,

•Refusal to collectively negotiate – which seriously disadvantages individual newsagents
•Take it or leave it contracts.
•‘Lock in’ which prevents newsagents suffering unanticipated economic deterioration (circulation decline) from exiting
•No proper recognition of specific costs factors escalation which can obviously adversely impact on ‘locked in’ newsagents
•Newsagents getting less advantageous terms than big players like supermarkets
•Newsagents supplied and charged for products that they do not want.
•Unilateral variation of contracts.

They are certainly valid. These problems exist largely because newsagents used to have a monopoly on newspapers and magazines. So, as a result, ACCC started to look at newsagents. The price of the monopoly then was a cheap local delivery. Now the monopoly has gone yet the publishers of newspapers and the ACCC want the cheap local delivery of newspapers to continue.

What the ACCC did allow was voluntarily collective negotiations with newspaper publishers with a state newsagency body. As the publishers of newspapers do not wish to deal with the newsagents collectively, so they do not. This means that large individual players like supermarkets that in many ways are larger than all newsagencies can use their might to negotiate better terms, whereas newsagents cannot. Therefore, newsagents are being offered terrible terms with no negotiation.

What many newsagents that are refusing to sign these contracts are saying is "You can't have your cake and eat it too."

I will be doing a presentation on benchmarking to some newsagency suppliers. So I decided to adopt newspapers as an example of how different newsagencies can be to determine, how much is this red part of the shop worth?

Here is a chart of two newsagent stores with a similar turnover and both are in suburb strips yet look at the difference newspapers have. Click on the chart for more detail.

This is why our benchmarking system has so many choices as you have to be very careful about generalising from one newsagents experiences to a community.

If this sounds obvious to you, believe me, it is not so obvious to many of your suppliers.

[Charts removed]

In fewer than two weeks, XChangeIT intents to turn off the old version at the end of December 2009. We have contacted all our clients that might be affected, most we hope have now updated. XChangeIT intends to contact those that remain.

All newsagents currently using the “old” XchangeIT software will need to install the “new” XchangeIT Link Software now. If you have not yet done it, an information sheet is available here.

Helpdesk: 8:00 am to 4:30 pm AEST
Phone 1300 551 212