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.

Times and Telegraph blog the Blair-Brown interregnum

Posted by Martin Stabe on 27 June 2007 at 16:20
Tags: Times

The Times has been doing a great job today covering the handover of power to Gordon Brown on its News Blog.

It has used the blog to highlight the many steps of today’s transition, including some great little details that would not have made it into full stories.

My favourite post of the day is the one put up by Sam Coates at one o’clock this afternoon about who would be in charge during the half-hour interregnum between Tony Blair’s resignation and Gordon Brown’s meeting with the Queen.

For about 30 minutes, Britain would be without a prime minister — plenty of time for Coates’ 85-word post to explain how the British constitution deals with this procedural quirk.

Update: Just noticed that The Telegraph’s by Carlin and Isaby made the same observation on their blog much earlier in the day. They note that the thought came from a qustion at the morning briefing for Lobby journalists yesterday. The factoid was certainly trotted out at exactly the right moment!

New York Times publishes Murdoch investigation

Posted by Martin Stabe on 25 June 2007 at 07:06
Tags: New York Times, Sunday Times, Times, Times Media, Wall Street Journal

The New York Times has this morning published its much-anticipated investigation into News Corp. The story, which Murdoch himself declined to be interviewed for, includes four bylines, including Jane Perlez and Raymond Bonner reporting from London.

The key line in the New York Times investigation, which comes as Murdoch seeks to acquire the rival Wall Street Journal, come in paragraph nine:

What worries his critics is that Mr. Murdoch will use The Journal, which has won many Pulitzer Prizes and has a sterling reputation for accuracy and fairness, as yet another tool to further his myriad financial and political agendas.

The piece explains that the Bancroft family, which controls Dow Jones, has sought assurances of the Wall Street Journal’s continued editorial independence if Murdoch were to become its proprietor, before noting that “When he bought The Times of London in 1981 he gave similar assurances, but some former editors say he meddled with news operations anyway”

The piece pays close attention to News Corp’s governance of The Times, which Murdoch is said to favour replicating at the Wall Street Journal. It quotes former editors Harry Evans, Fred Emery and Andrew Neil to allege Murdoch’s interference with his British broadsheets.

Neil is quoted as saying: “He puts people in who will do his bidding”.

But current Times editor Robert Thompson, who is believed to have a key role in Murdoch’s attempt to acquire Dow Jones, paints a different picture: “I’ve had absolutely no interference and a lot of investment in a loss-making newspaper, for which Rupert Murdoch gets no credit.”

The bulk of the story, however, examines the Murdoch empire’s influence on US politics, and particularly media regulation. In the dozen years since moving the company to America, the New York Times says, Murdoch’s companies have “thrived in a highly regulated environment in part because of his remarkable ability to mold the rules to fit his needs.”

The piece also looks at campaign contributions linked to Murdoch or News Corp, which are more balanced between Republicans and Democrats than might be expected in the United States, where his best-known properties are Fox News and the New York Post.

Relaunching and circulation: The ugly truth

Posted by Martin Stabe on 4 November 2006 at 17:43
Tags: Guardian, Independent, Journalism, Observer, Times

Mark Friesen of Newsdesigner.com has a fascinating post that visualises the effect of relaunches on newspaper circulation.

Graphing the before-and-after ABC figures of several American newspapers that have recently undergone expensive redesigns, the continued — and sometimes worsening — downward trend is unmistakable.

But here in Britain, the relaunch effect appears to be slightly more positive.

Friesen also plotted ABC figured from the Times, Independent, Guardian and Observer in the same way. It shows the Times and Indy posting circulation gains since embracing the compact format. The Guardian and Observer achieved big circulation spikes when they relaunched in the Berliner size, but have since tumbled back to their circulations of around a year before the relaunch.

Times editor backs Google in Belgian case

Posted by Martin Stabe on 11 October 2006 at 12:45
Tags: Google, Journalism, Sunday Times, Times, Times Online

Times editor Robert Thomson has criticised the Belgian court ruling that found Google in breach of Belgium’s French- and German-language newspapers’ copyright, and said that he has no problem with Google News as long as it sends traffic to TimesOnline.

Speaking at Press Gazette’s “Breakfast with the Editor” event yesterday, Thomson said: “My reading in English of some of the judgement suggests that the judge doesn’t really know what the Internet is — or was, or will be. You can’t corral content in the way that that decision implies.”

Thomson went on to outline his view on Google News, the search giant’s news aggregation tool that has occasionally proved controversial in newspaper publishing circles.

“Google News at the moment gives you headlines, and I know they’ve been working on a program that gives you a couple of paragraphs without actually taking you to the web site,” he said, apparently referring to Google’s purchase earlier this year of “Orion”, software that allows a search engine to extract relevant parts of a page directly from within a search engine.

“I have no issue with them as long as they’re directing you to our site and to the wonderful advertisements that you take out on TimesOnline — that is content being rewarded with revenue, and we can all understand that relationship. But if they had two paragraphs of our content or three paragraphs of our content and put contextual ads or display ads against that without driving the traffic to our site, we’d have an issue with that — and I’d probably call that Belgian judge to see if he wouldn’t mind sitting in session over here.”

AOP: The evolving content model

Posted by Martin Stabe on 4 October 2006 at 10:26
Tags: Bebo, Channel 4, Incisive Media, Journalism, Sunday Times, Times, Times Media, UK AOP

The first panel of the day features Ron Henwood, new business director of Channel 4, Times Media digital publisher Zach Leonard, Incisive media chairman Tim Weller and Jim Scheinman of Bebo.

The famously “platform agnostic” Weller praises Incisive Media’s “fantastic” B2B journalists, but says that one challenge is been to wean them off the habit of clinging onto their stories until they appear under a byline in a printed magazine.

Having established printing as quickly as possible in online publications as the norm at Incisive, however, leadto new challenges for reinventing the established print products.

“Print products need to be more discoursive, forward-thinking, and analystical” rather than just printing news, Weller says.

In the  Q&A, the the panel is asked several questions touching on the competition between businesses focusing on horizontal content and those concentrating on narrow vertical niches. One question touches on whether the growth of vertical search engines is a threat to B2B publishers like Weller.

He rejects this, saying that vertical search is an opportunity for Incisive, and one which the company is already exploring in the insurance industry.

But Weller says narrower is generally better, and that his company always hopes to create products that appeal to the most specific community of buyers as possible.

Times Media’s Zach Leonard, however, says that for “horizontal” general interest publications like the Times titles, the correct response it to create many specific vertical channels that allow advertisers to target readers more precisely.

Leonard is also asked whether the Times has any plans for paid content products. He alludes to the Times newspapers’ vast archive, stretching back into the 18th century, which it is looking to use better online.

Basic archives can be used to simply increase traffic, but specific packages of that content could become paid-for content. He mentions that Virginia Woolfe once wrote film reviews for the Times and that this might be something that could be a product to monetize through reader payment.

Former Times correspondent will edit Marie Claire

Posted by Jeffrey Blyth on 19 April 2006 at 09:38
Tags: Journalism, Marie Claire, Times, United States

A former New York bureau chief for The Times has been appointed editor-in chief-of Marie Claire, the Hearst-owned American version of the French beauty and fashion magazine.

Joanna Coles replaces Lesley Jane Seymour, who has been editor for almost five years.

Coles, after leaving The Times in 2001, worked for New York Magazine, first as articles editor and then features editor. Eighteen months ago she joined More, the Meredith magazine for women over 50, as executive editor. She was a popular and respected editor.

Coles will take up her new job in May. Hearst has made no official comment except to announce Seymour is leaving the company.

One of the oddities of the unexpected change is that Marie Claire was recently nominated for an award at next month’s National Magazine Awards, its first nomination for at least five years. Also Marie Claire’s circulation, under Seymour, grew thre per cent in the second half of last year to a total of just under 1 million, plus another half million newsstand sales.

Weekend paper roundup

Posted by Martin Stabe on 18 April 2006 at 10:54
Tags: Blogs, Five, Guardian, Independent, Journalism, Metro, Observer, People, Times

The continuing fake sheikh brouhaha wasn’t the only meta-news item this extended weekend.

Columnist and documentary-maker Dominik Diamond did not go through with his planned Easter crucifixtion in the Philippines, the Scotsman reported. The Scotsman also reported that the Scottish Information Commissioner will be naming and shaming public authorities that are failing to comply with the Freedom of Information Act.

Friday’s Guardian says former Sun editor Kelvin Mackenzie is exploring the possibility of launching an upmarket sports magazine and had a profile of Seymour Hersh, the legendary American investigative journalist who has been making waves again about his stories about the US military’s plans for Iran.

The Sunday Times says Swedish tycoon Pelle Tornberg is planning to bid for the new free afternoon commuter paper in London, the one major European city where his Metro group does not own the commuter title of that name.

In the Independent, Peter Cole argued that newspapers are vacillating between panic and complacency over bird flu. There’s also a profile of Trinity Mirror boss Sly Bailey, on the occasion of her 12.9 per cent pay rise.

The Observer says racism is rife in British newspapers, according to the Commisson for Racial Equality. In a story laden with martial metaphors, the Observer also suggests that the recent newspaper acquisitions in Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavia by David Montgomery’s Mecom group is just a warmup for an assault on British newspapers. Peter Preston says the latest ABC figures show the People is in big trouble, but that this is part of a bigger transformation of the tabloid universe:

We know the ancient redtop order of things is crumbling. Lads have their boob-filled mags; cable TV runs gossip shows; websites peddle porn unlimited. The target arena, in sum, is a lot more crowded than it used to be, and the working-class audience may be Polish or Pakistani now - so not much into seaside humour and Union Jackery.

Preston also has some interesting views on the success of the newly-compact quality papers. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the Independent, Times, and Guardian titles don’t owe their recent success to sardine-tinned commuters enjoying the new tabloid or Berliner format. Most of their gains, after all, seem to be coming on Saturdays.

It was also busy weekend in the blogosphere. Those who were not obsessing over the ‘Euston manifesto’ published in the New Statesman noticed some interesting things, as well. Regret the Error caught the Gloucestershire Echo naming the wrong man as a convicted criminal.

Chicken Yoghurt has some pointed questions about the Independent’s commitment to environmentalism. Why are they giving away free flights on the same front pages that fret about global warming, Justin McKeating wants to know.

On the Huffington Post, Larisa Alexandrovna accuses the Associated Press of plagairising a story she wrote for the news web site Raw Story. But the AP was independently contacted by some of Alexandrovna’s sources, so it’s all a bit of a storm in a teacup about the wire not attributing the story to her investigation. But it does speak volumes about big news organisations’ attitudes to online-only upstarts like Raw Story. Alexandrovna says an AP spokesman told her that the agency’s policy is that information gleaned from blogs does not require attribution.

Finally, forget the well-known traffic-boosting effect of a link from Slashdot or Digg. Among blogging journalists in the United States, the major traffic-driver is Jim Romenesko’s blog at the Poynter Institute. Just about every American journalist reads it, and a link from Romenesko can drive a small blog’s traffic through the roof in an instant, as one journalism lecturer in Florida discovered last week.

Inside this week’s Press Gazette

Posted by Martin Stabe on 30 March 2006 at 13:23
Tags: ABC, BBC, Citizen journalism, Daily Telegraph, Economist, Guardian, Journalism, Mirror, Mobile Phones, NUJ, New Media, News of the World, Online, Regionals, Spectator, Sunday Telegraph, Times, War reporting

Some highlights from tomorrow’s Press Gazette:

The owners of the Daily Telegraph, the Barclay Brothers, have discovered that their ploy bringing libel cases under French criminal law — a tactic most recently deployed against the Times — cuts both ways. The Sunday Telegraph has paid out to the estranged father of comedian Jimmy Carr after his lawyers threatened drag the paper before a French tribunbal.

George Galloway has threatened to publish pictures of Mazher Mahmood after the News of the World’s “fake sheikh” attempted one of his famous sting operations on the controvertial Respect MP. (The Guardian’s Duncan Campbell today has more on the foiled “sheikh-down”.)

A former Times fashion journalist, Emily Davies, is at the heart of a plagiarism row after an American publisher gave her a £515,000 advance on a book. In a statement to us, Davies admits “genuinely accidental misattribution” of parts of the book proposal — but says there is “a dirty tricks campaign” to discredit her. Lawyers have stopped us from publishing Davies’s publicity photograph.

Regular Dog readers already know this, but the Guardian’s web site will make £1 million profit this year. This emerged at the MediaGuardian Changing Media Summit, where Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow enthused about citizen journalism.

Roy Greenslade told a Newspaper Society conference that regional newspapers need to challenge to the online competition from the BBC. His most recent Daily Telegraph column is adapted from the speech. We hear that Greenslade, who recently resigned from the Telegraph, has some super-secret online project for the Guardian up his sleeve.

Multichannel television on mobile phones set to be launched by mobile network O2 within a fortnight, and if the results of a recent pilot of the service in Oxford is anything to go by, news is set to be one of the most popular offerings.

New Economist editor John Micklethwait says he wants to double the magazine’s circulation to 2 million readers worldwide over the next 10 years. Speaking of new magazine editors, we also have an interview with Matthew D’Ancona of the Spectator — he’s into punk rock, apparently.

The National Union of Journalists is backing Richard Gizbert, a London-based correspondent for ABC News, who was sacked after he refused to go to Iraq. The American television network is appealing against an Employment Tribunal ruling that Gizbert was unfairly dismissed.

A non-attributable, on-the-record background briefing

Posted by Martin Stabe on 9 March 2006 at 17:16
Tags: Freedom of Information, Journalism, Times

In the Times City Diary, Martin Waller recounts being invited to an “on-the-record, off-camera briefing” by Hazel Blears, followed by “a non-attributable on-the-record background briefing” by Home Office officials:

I’m lost. You can talk to her, but not take pictures? You can quote them, but not say who they are? Then you can’t talk to anybody? Which bits are we allowed to mention? And what has this to do with open government?

I’m lost too. Can the man from the ministry enlighten us confused hacks?

A Home Office spokesman confesses that the word “background” — which is more or less synonymous with “off-the-record” to Sir Humphrey  — slipped into Waller’s invitation in error.

So what’s a “a non-attributable on-the-record briefing”?

Apparently, it’s when Home Office civil servants explain “something of a highly technical nature” — about police pensions, in this case — to a gaggle of puzzled hacks. The Home Office was happy for these technical details to be quoted verbatim, but not to have them attributed to the civil servants by name.

As for Blears’ “on-the-record, off-camera briefing”, it was a fully attributable meeting with the minister. No problem with tape recorders or notepads — just the snappers and TV crews were out of lock. Maybe Ms Blears was afraid they would steal her soul.