Guardian Aims To Double Digital Revenue In Five Years, CEO Says

PaidContent reporting:
The worsening state of the printed news and advertising market has prompted The Guardian to downsize in print and become “digital-first” earlier than previously expected, Guardian Media Group CEO Andrew Miller tells paidContent.
“We now have a financial imperative we didn’t have before,” said Miller, who was upped from finance chief a year ago. “The financial pressure all newspapers are facing through the shift is such that our losses are increasing and I can’t see a way of those not decreasing without first making ourselves digital-first.”
Miller rejects the idea this is about digital-first now and digital-only next. “All newspapers will ultimately exit print,” Miller acknowledged. “But we’re putting no timeframe on that. This is about repositioning the business to be digital-first. I don’t know if anyone’s said that before at a major newspaper. It’s about finding the right format for newspapers in our portfolio.”
As a response both to changing reader habits and the business model underpinning print, The Guardian will cut back on newspaper pages and run less news reporting in them by next March.
“Only four percent of our readers read the paper for breaking news stories in the morning - they read in print in the evening rather than earlier in the day,” Miller said. ‘We’ll do a reformatted daily newspaper in this financial year, with more analysis, longer pieces.”
Miller reckons “it’s quite a bold decision” and “it’s probably accelerated” the eventual print-to-digital transition
http://paidcontent.co.uk/article/419-interview-guardian-aims-to-double-digital-revenue-in-five-years-ceo-say/