Digital highlights from Northcliffe presentation

Posted by Martin Stabe on 12 October 2007 at 10:00
Tags: Associated Northcliffe Digital, Journalism, Northcliffe

Northcliffe Media’s investor briefing to the Cityearlier this week made for some very interesting reading.

NMG managing director Michael Pelosi said: “We must deliver local audiences if we are to achieve profitable revenue growth. Digital publishing has a key role to play here.”

Meanwhile, the company also announced this week that Associated Northcliffe Digital is being reorganised to hand control over web sites back to individual newspaper titles’ editors and managing directors.

The slideshow PDF and full transcript (DOC) are on the DMGT web site. But if you don’t want to wade through all of that, we’ve done it for you:

DMGT’s strategy is to invest in media businesses where long term growth is achievable, both in consumer and B2B sectors. In the consumer sector, Pelosi said, “we will be investing to develop their digital businesses”.
In Britain, the company’s aim is to “meet user needs with multiple platforms”. In the long term, its “regional diversity and flexible media formats crate resilient business model”
Online editorial control has been decentralised, Pelosi said: “All local editorial departments are now at the heart of online publishing. In the past, it was handled centrally. Breaking news online was not something which local centres could do easily. That has all changed.”
Each Northcliffe centre is now an “Integrated Local Media Publisher” that “thinks print and on-line”. In their integrated newsrooms, there is “editorial control over on-line publishing”
There are “no restrictions on news appearing on-line first” and “stories are broken when they are ready and not to suit print deadlines”.
New features are coming to ThisIs sites, Pelosi said: “we are building new community areas, which should be ready later this year“.
Traffic at thisisGloucestershire spiked heavily to a peak of more than 35,000 unique visitors per day during the July flood as it kept readers up to date with vital information, like where to find drinking water. Traffic has not subsided to pre-flood levels. The site now routinely has upwards of 10,000 unique users on weekdays.
Intellitracker data shows unique visitors across the ThisIs sites in September 2007 were up 42 per cent year on year to around 2.5 million.
This integrated approach also extends to sales teams, who take a “combined print and on-line approach”.
Digital revenues are up 77 per cent year-on-year; however “ink-on-paper products … still deliver 95% of all advertising revenues”.
Print accounts for 90 per cent of recruitment revenues, with online-only accounting for just 1 per cent, digital up-sells accounting for 7 per cent and CV matching for 2 per cent.
Finance Director Martyn Hindley: “Advertisers are only interested only in the effectiveness of the solution to provide them with quality applications, not the split in revenue between print and digital products.”
Northcliffe is converting free online property listings to paid-for ads, but digital revenues in the property sector are “small”.

Another area of the presentation that will interest journalists is its discussion of the Aim Higher cost reduction programme, which “delivered savings of £45m“, with the largest slice coming from £9.5m editorial cuts. Headcount was reduced from 6,809 to 5,058 in the three years to September.

Martyn Hindley, Northcliffe’s Finance Director, insisted this had not affected quality:

Editorial contributed the largest element of the savings. Again the emphasis was on process, not content. We shield away from any cost reduction activity that we believed would have impacted on quality, particularly on our local news gathering operations. Indeed, in the South West we actually bought in-house our photographic operations.