Are we dying – no, of course not!

ANDREW Neill, well known in media circles as a long-time Murdoch editor and now publisher of the Spectator in Britain, has been in the region talking about the future of media, writes Mark Hollands

He had a chat with Leigh Sales, of the ABC’s Lateline program, the other night. She asked the world’s most obvious but ill-informed media question, “are newspapers dying?” Her job to do so. No problem with that. And Neill gave an excellent answer, and also spent sometime explaining that our newspapers are not likes those basket cases in the United States. He also illustrates the importance of your newspaper website if you have the gumption, imagination and execution to get it right.

You can stream the video and listen to the entire interview, although it finishes with a spruik of Neill’s Spectator magazine – ‘champagne for the brain’ or some such tosh. (I thought you weren’t allowed to sell on the ABC but clearly you are). However, it’s still worth a watch and courtesy of the ABC transcript, below is his answer to Leigh’s $64 million question:

Neill:
No, they are not. Some are, some deserve to die. The trend is most pronounced in the United States because the United States is dominated by inefficient high cost big city monopoly newspapers who are not used to competing.

So, they’re really taking a hit because they’ve been fat cats they can’t handle the revolution that is the Internet and multichannel TV. I don’t think that’ true of British or Australian newspapers.

We’re much more competitive. Yes, some of the weaker brethren will go; they deserve do. Will there be a move to the web, yes.

But I think the strong newspaper brands in Britain and Australia, not so much in continental Europe where they’re weak too, but in Britain and Australia they will survive and they will have very strong websites as well.

Our strongest brands also have strong web plays, and we’ve stopped thinking it’s an either or proposition. Indeed we know you can’t have one without the other, and the opportunities are great.

You think of famous British brands that went global before the Internet age. ‘The Financial Times’, ‘The Economist’.

Well, there’s a third called the ‘Guardian’, because the Guardian web site is one of the… it’s now the third biggest website in American newspapers. It’s bigger than the ‘LA Times’ or the ‘Washington Post’.

So, there are huge opportunities out there as well as problems. There’s change in media. Every major model, whether it’s in broadcasting or newspapers or magazines, is now under threat. But that doesn’t mean to say we can’t adapt.”

New Jakarta daily finds its wings

WHEN the Jakarta Globe, a new daily newspaper, was being put together in 2008, the company selected WoodWing Enterprise 6 as the publishing solution for its newsroom.

The English language Indonesian newspaper was built from scratch in eleven months, and the first issue appeared on November 12, 2008.

Serious Technology, an experienced WoodWing Authorised Solution Partner, implemented the solution.

The paper quickly assembled a team of seasoned international and local journalists, built a newsroom from the ground up and hammered together an editorial and business strategy.

A. Lin Neumann, Chief Editorial Adviser of the Jakarta Globe, describes the challenges of the project. “We had to make many important decisions in a very short time. And of course a state-of-the-art newsroom system was at the top of the list. We needed something cost effective but flexible that could handle all our current and future needs.”

 John Fong, Chief Executive of Serious Technology said: “We implemented the WoodWing editorial and asset management system on site. It was challenging, but well worth it.”

Serious Technology and Woodwing were also involved in the 2006 launch of Kontan, a business daily in Jakarta.

Today, the full-color 48-page daily newspaper offers readers a distinctive three-section publication from Monday to Saturday.

The tag line ‘”Great Stories, Global News,” stresses the reading experience. “Readers should feel little difference between reading an AFP or New York Times wire story and our locally written stories. We aim to provide quality to our readers”, Neumann explains.

Current circulation is at about 40,000 per day, higher than the Jakarta Post, the Globe’s nearest competitor and a mainstay in the market for 25 years.

Remco Koster, Managing Director of WoodWing Asia Pacific, said: “Flexibility and a low TCO are crucial in these challenging economic times. The implementation speed and short learning curve for newsroom staff add to our competitive edge.”

Don’t let niche sites nick your readers

LESS journalists are reporting from Washington DC, and a higher percentage of those who remain are from specialist publications or websites, according to an AP story on the US National Public Radio site.

By Brett Taylor, PANPA

If you’re a trend junkie like us here at PANPA, this is an intriguing snapshot of consumer behaviour and the media’s response.

The article says the amount of political content being produce for ‘general interest’ media, such as mainstream newspapers, is on the decrease while niche brands such as Politico.com are rising to take their place for readers who have a specific interest in politics.

Theoretically, people who once bought a newspaper mainly for the political stories, with some news on the side, might now instead go straight to the dedicated political news sites, and catch the day’s other events online, on the radio or on TV later, wherever.

The same scenario is being mirrored in any number of topic areas. If a reader has a particular passion for golf, there are an increasing number of specialist websites he or she can visit that will supercede the coverage given to golf by your daily newspaper’s sports pages.

This is presents a challenge for mainstream newspapers, which (in terms of topic mix) are jacks of all trades and masters of none.

The solution isn’t to throw resources at every topic area, in an attempt to be the most comprehensive resource. That is too expensive, and someone focussing wholly on, say, entertainment news, is always going to do a better job at covering it than a newspaper that has the rest of the world to worry about.

The answer is to provide an experience for the reader that their favourite niche sites can’t match.

You must inform your reader of the day’s events, but package them in a way that can be consumed faster and understood easier, with a focus on the elements of a story that affect people’s lives.

You must set the news agenda to differentiate yourself from the myriad of other sources available. You must break news – exclusives are the ultimate differentiator.

You must build community within your readership. A reader should feel like they are participating in their society by picking up your paper, and contributing to the community by leaving you a comment online, or sending in a picture from their mobile phone.

Reading a blog written on the other side of the world might satisfy someone’s special interest area, but it can bring a certain sense of detachment from the real world. Picking up the local paper should be the opposite – it should connect a reader with the people around them.

You must make up for the lack of quantity of content on individual topics with quality. If you can’t have an army of science reporters to compete with www.newscientist.com, pay for a must-read columnist that will have the science nerds coming back every time. For a regional paper, this might hiring in the best mind on the local sports team.

And in the online space, you must branch out and connect with the very sites that might be taking your readers away. Network with popular blogs, don’t compete with them. A die-hard music fan will respect you more if you’re hooked in with the online community of music news. Link to other sites and aggregate the best music blogs and resources on the web. Be part of the movement.

Just as job ads and classifieds have shifted online, where they exist in an environment more convenient for the user, it gets easier by the day for people to bypass the newspaper package and go to dedicated sources for everything from weather, to cinema listings, to news about the environment. The newspaper product must be improved, and that product promoted loudly and clearly, if it is to remain a tool worth using.

Sex sells, but readers aren’t buying it

‘SEXY Jennifer Hawkins Boobs Again’

That was the headline sitting atop the PerthNow website’s list of most popular stories of the day.

By Brett Taylor, editorial coordinator, PANPA

As a newspaper association employee, and a career journalist in the making, I felt it was my duty to click the link and see what the story was about to research this blog post.

Or was it because I’m a 22-year-old male?

Or was it because I knew I wasn’t about to land on a page with a celebrity’s bare breasts staring back at me on a newspaper site, and I was curious to see what WAS on this page, and why so many others had clicked it.

The article (you can read it here, I would have given you the link earlier but I wanted to get you interested before you clicked away!) was a four paragraph piece about how the former Miss Universe had ‘boobed’ by revealing the results of the reality show she hosts – Make Me A Supermodel – before the final episode had aired.

What I found amazing was that the article didn’t even give the reader this would-be-secret information!

There’s no hiding what the article was – a very clever headline to attract hits and another excuse to link to endless pic galleries of stunning celebrities. You see these every day, on many news sites.

Here is an example of a ‘curious’ headline on a Fairfax site today. It is arguably less innocent than the Hawkins example because its headline implies a more serious topic, for those who follow US politics.

But what was interesting about the Hawkins piece was the reader comments. You can view them yourself, but to summarise, a number of readers accused PerthNow of misleading them. The people demanded to see the boobs they were promised!

“Is this headline designed purely to increase the hits given the way internet searches are done?”, asked someone who named themself ‘curious’.

We keep hearing the likes of David Kirk and Rupert Murdoch talking about the trust and credibility value of newspapers as the keys to their survival in an age of information overload. I agree. It’s what I like to call the ‘big differentiator’.

When there’s infinite sources of information, opinion and entertainment; a high-quality, trustworthy, balanced aggregation tool for the most relevant and important information delivered in a timely and digestible format becomes extremely valuable.

We’re all aware of the commercial realities of making that model viable. Advertisers want numbers. But is it worth eroding that newspaper-reader trust for the sake of a few hits in the case of these sexed-up/curiosity-driven headlines on trivial stories?

“It’s a fine line,” says PerthNow’s editor Allen Newton. “You do want to deliver a satisfying result for your reader if they click on a link.”

Mr Newton admits there is a pressure in the online newsroom to produce content that attracts hits.

Today, PerthNow has two mini video games in its top ten list: ‘Cubefield’ and ‘The world’s hardest game’.

Mr Newton says a curiosity piece called ‘left brain, right brain’ “absolutely took off” on the site last year. LBRB, which has over 2,100 user comments, determines what sort of thinker you are by how you see an image. Since its success, staff have been on the lookout for interesting little time-wasters they come across on the web, in emails from friends, or wherever.

“We’re expanding our offering,” says Newton. “It doesn’t have to be news, news and more news.”

I grew up playing these sorts of mini-games. In fact I wasted more of my teen years on them than I care to remember. I accessed them through websites like www.addictinggames.com and www.miniclip.com.

I’m also reminded of a quote from video-journalist David Leeson in his workshop at the PANPA 08 conference. Mr Leeson had an editor at the Dallas Morning News complaining that his video wasn’t getting enough hits.

He snapped back: “Hits? Hits! If it’s only about hits, forget the news, I’ll go and shoot porn tomorrow!”

I think he made a fair point that day.

In my Gen Y household, when I want games, I would visit a site like AddictingGames or Yahoo games. When my girlfriend wants celebrity gossip, she goes to PerezHilton.com – a site that nails that genre better than any newspaper anywhere. We’re not exactly on the lookout for scantily-clad women…but if we were, it’s no secret the internet has plenty of, shall we say, ‘comprehensive’ sites dedicated to that topic!

I’m a Sydneysider. When I want news, I’m not afraid to say I prefer smh.com.au over the dailytelegraph.com.au. I find it easier at the Fairfax site to find what I want – news – without getting lost in a web of bikini pics and gossip.

Obviously the proof is in the pudding in terms of the hits the sexy stories attract. It seems silly to abandon them for more hard news. And as for games – there’s a place for those on newspaper websites, just like there’s a place for the crossword in the newspaper.

But the core focus shouldn’t be lost. I’m part of a generation of young readers coming through who grew up on the internet. We know what’s out there and where to find it. As people become more web-savvy, they’ll find other, and better, sources for the other bits and pieces. The novelty of news with a side-serving of sex will wear off. And the newspaper’s role of aggregator will be lost if their websites make it harder to find the news you need amongst a sea of ambiguous headlines.

Real news has to be the priority. A website can set the agenda in the same way the newspaper does, while retaining its interactivity. What about a list of the editor’s top 5 ‘must-read’ stories of the day next to the list of the most popular ones?

Perhaps its time to start pointing newspaper web presences towards the differentiated position Mr Kirk and Mr Murdoch speak of.

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