@Society of Editors - Football economics coming to online journalism salaries?

Posted by Martin Stabe on 6 November 2007 at 11:14
Tags: Guardian Media Group, Mail on Sunday, Sky, Sky News, Sky.com, Society of Editors, Society of Editors, Telegraph Media Group, Telegraph.co.uk, Times Online, telegraph

The final session of the conference is “The Future is ours: 2020 Vision”, which is billed as “lifting the covers on editors’ crystal balls”.

Appropriately, the panel will be chaired by Martin Stanford, presenter of Sky.com News, the rolling news channel’s interactive programme which covers the most popular stories and debates on the web. He reveals the the Madeleine McCann story has constantly lead Sky news traffic, regardless of what else is going on. Meanwhile, the revelation that the home secretary smoked cannabis, which was a massive story everywhere else, “scored an absolute zero”.

Anne Spackman, editor-in-chief of Times Online, says the paper has been digitising its archive, which will add 20 million items to its website, which already has 750,000 “bits of content” at any one time. It is noticable how litttle the publication has changed over the first 200 years, she says, but the pace of change has increased dramatically.

Her most startling prediction for the future is the rise of football economics in journalism. Spackman describes a “Drogba effect” where pay in journalism will be greatly skewed towards stars who are able to bring in a lot of traffic online.

Spackman repeats her comments from last week about the type of journalists she is seeking to recruit for Times Online: “The people who are by far the most valuable are those who combine journalism skills with real technical skill.”

Her prediction for 2020 reflects her view that many people with these attributes are currently men: “I think this will be an industry rather more full of men than it is now.”

Mark Dodson, chief executive of GMG Regional Media, which includes the host Manchester Evening News, says things have changed dramatically in this sector. Cover prices were static for years, and companies relentlessly measured themselves against the semi-annual ABC figures. That has all changed recently, with the introduction of part-free distribution and new online products.

“Video will be a key aspect of every web site we produce,” Dodson says.

Will Lewis, editor-in-chief of the Telegraph Group, outlines the trends he expects in the next few years:

1. Localisation - Good news for the regional press, because there will be greater focus on customising news by location.
2. Personalisation - Mobile and other personal gateways will become the preferred medium tailored to the individuals
3. Enablers - Rather than handing down pearls of wisdom, and will provide practical help and user-generated
4. Double media - Video and text will not be enough. They want to read as the watch.
5. Customer obsessiveness - It is no longer a secret what our readers actually want. We will sell more papers where people now shop. “Our customers will be as much outside the UK as within it,” he concludes.

New research on UK newspapers’ online business models

Posted by Martin Stabe on 5 July 2007 at 14:11
Tags: Financial Times, Guardian, Independent, International Herald Tribune, Mail on Sunday, Star, Sun, Times, Times Online

National newspapers’ online editors and managers are increasingly seeing print and online editions as complementary products, and at some titles concern about cannibalisation has “diminished to the stage where they are not a significant influence on strategy”.

These are among the key findings of newly-published research in the business models of national newspaper web sites by Jack Herbert and Neil Thurman of City University.

Ironically, perhaps, given its findings about the diminishing importance of paywalls at newspaper web sites, the definitive version of the study is only available to subscribers of the academic journal Journalism Practice. Non-subscribers can download it for £14.

However, a pre-print version is available from City University’s web site.

The report is the result of interviews conducted last summer with the online editors or managers of the national newspaper web sites.

Sites are charging for news, columnists, archives, digital editions, e-mail alerts, mobile services. But in a buoyant advertising market, many of the sites are finding it advantageous to make more of their content available for free to increase overall traffic, the study finds.

None of the sites charge for general interest news, a finding the authors attribute to the “availability of this relatively generic content for free”

Times Online’s former editor Peter Bale told the researchers that the site had experienced a “huge” increase in traffic when it dropped pay barriers to overseas users and has also opened its archives.

Even those running sites with paywalls, like Independent online edition, FT.com, and Scotsman.com could see the potential benefits of dropping the barriers.

Advertising is the main revenue stream for national newspapers’ web sites, with up to 90 per cent of revenues coming from advertising. The study also found that revenue from online services and commercial partnerships is growing rapidly. It accounted for a third of total profits at Telegraph.co.uk, and was growing by 20 to 30 percent at Guardian Unlimited.

Several of the editors and managers interviewed indicated that they were increasingly unconcerned about cannibalising their print editions. Alan Revell of Associated Northcliffe Digital told the researchers that a survey of Daily Mail readers had found that they did not view DailyMail.co.uk as a substitute for the print edition, and that the site’s presence did not affect frequency with which they buy the printed edition.

Pete Picton, editor of Sun Online, told the researchers that the real competition competition was the Internet as a whole.

“[T]here is cannibalization by the Internet, not by the Sun Online per se,” he said.

The theory of cannibalization, the researchers found, is based on the assumption that that people stick with a particular news brand, regardless of medium. That idea may now be “completely dead”, Richard Withey of the Independent told the researchers. Simon Waldman of the Guardian agreed, stressing the behaviour of “promiscuous readers” online. Exactly: the attention economy is hungry for our lunch.

Some other key findings from the interviews with online editors:

• Digital editions are only providing marginal revenue streams and see them as an imperfect technology
• Email services were a growing area and editors were excited about their
  revenue potential
• Concerns about cannibalization “have diminished to the stage where they are not a significant influence on strategy” at the Guardian, the Daily Mirror, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express.

DMGT digital revenues soar while print ads slump

Posted by Martin Stabe on 15 March 2006 at 12:23
Tags: Associated Newspapers, Daily Mail, Evening Standard, Mail on Sunday, Metro, Northcliffe, Online, Teletext

Increased digital advertising revenue was the silver lining in a trading update released by Daily Mail and General Trust today showing slumping ad revenue at both Northcliffe and Associated Newspapers.

Over the five months to February, digital advertising revenues at DMGT’s regional newspaper group, Northcliffe, soared by 17 per cent compared with the same period last year, while advertising overall slumped by 7 per cent.

At Associated Newspapers, which includes the Daily Mail Mail on Sunday, London’s Evening Standard and Metro, there was a similar pattern. The papers’ display advertising revenues fell by 10 per cent; classified advertising revenues were down 11 per cent — but digital advertising revenue was up 43 per cent. That includes revenue from Associated New Media’s online classified advertising sites Jobsite, Find a Property and the recently-acquired Prime Location.

Bring on Craig Newmark’s tanks.