The Saturday Paper finds an audience for quality journalism

At a time when redundancies in newsrooms seem to be commonplace in the media industry, Schwartz Media’s The Saturday Paper is searching for a new editor.

The founding editor Erik Jensen was recently promoted as editor-in-chief of the weekly title. He will still be involved in the day-to-day operations of producing The Saturday Paper, but will also take more of an active part in recognising the biggest growth opportunities for the title, as well as future editorial and commercial direction.

The newspaper has been bucking the trend in the print industry since its inception in 2013, when conversations assuming the death of print was imminent were as rife as they are now.

“The paper was in a number of respects testing assumptions that had grown up and solidified in newsrooms about what print titles and digital titles could do,” Jensen told Mediaweek. “The Saturday Paper splits its audience pretty equally between print and online.”

This is the case despite its strong subscription model for digital. Readers online can read only one article free per week. To access more than one, the user has to be a subscriber.

“In testing those assumptions, we have found that there is an audience for quality journalism. There is an audience willing to pay for it. We don’t always need to be bleak as we are about the future of journalism,” Jensen said. “The cuts [at News Corp and Fairfax] are related to substantially changed business models where classifieds can’t be relied on for advertising.

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This is an excerpt of the full article, which appears in the latest issue of Mediaweek magazine. 

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