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.

Blog community doesn’t care for mag’s view of social workers

Posted by Martin Stabe on 17 September 2007 at 16:52
Tags: Blogs, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph

Community Care has had to close a comment thread on one of its blogs after a string of nasty comments on a post attacking the Daily Mail’s coverage of social work.

The post, by the RBI magazine’s deputy editor Janet Snell, promises a story in this week’s issue that will examine how, from its point of view, the Mail and the Telegraph had “hijacked” the story of an expectant mother who may have her child taken into foster care at birth. The magazine promises to put forward the social workers’ point of view.

Suffice to say that many commenters on Snell’s post do not share the her benign view of social workers.

“I had no idea that there was such a strong and virulent hatred of social workers,” says RBI’s head of blogging Adam Tinworth in an interesting post explaining the rationale of the decision to end the comments thread, a first for RBI’s B2B sites.

The silver lining, Tinworth notes, is that the discussion on the blog has become more active since the “Daily Mail incident”. His theory: the row drew more attention to the blog, and the sight of an active comment thread may have given timid readers the sense that the had “permission” to start leaving comments on the blog.

Sambrook: transparency and humility essential to trust in journalists (audio)

Posted by Martin Stabe on 7 September 2007 at 10:55
Tags: Andrew Keen, BBC, Fox News, Guardian, Richard Sambrook, Television, The Sun, The Sun Online

“Arrogance” was a major part of how the BBC “tripped up” in reporting the story that led to the Hutton inquiry, and journalists should show greater humility and transparency, the BBC’s director of global news, Richard Sambrook, has said.

Sambrook made the comment last night while interviewing Web 2.0 critic and Cult of the Amateur author Andrew Keen at the Frontline Club in London.

Sambrook’s remarks came during an exchange about trust in the media, after Keen had argued that journalists “should be more arrogant”.

“There’s a crisis of confidence in mainstream journalists,” Keen said.

“They need to be more arrogant. They need to remind people that they are seasoned professionals, the way doctors and lawyers and chefs do.

“Why apologise to the public? I see that more and more: The idea that we don’t know any more than you, so you should be telling us we should be reporting.If that’s true, all of you should just resign. Let’s just have the blogosphere.”

Sambrook disputed this view, saying that the real problem is that there isn’t enough humility or transparency in journalism.

“Yes, we do have expertise or skill, but we we’re not going to get the credit that may be conferred on that if we behave arrogantly or say ‘we know best’,” said Sambrook.

When Keen challenged Sambrook to offer an example where the BBC has been “really screwed up” or should have shown more humility, Sambrook mentioned the crisis that engulfed the BBC following Andrew Gilligan’s May 2003 Today programme report that the Blair government had, against the wishes of intelligence agencies, “sexed up” a dossier on the case for going to war in Iraq. That report was followed by the death of Gilligan’s source, Dr David Kelly, and led to the Hutton inquiry. Sambrook was director of BBC News during the crisis and testified before the inquiry.

“Personally, I think we got a lot of things right, but where we went wrong and where it became a crisis was because Andrew Gillian was sloppy — and he was sloppy probably because there was a touch of arrogance there. And the Today programme was overly defensive, probably because there was a touch of arrogance there.”

“Actually the story was right. Others may disagree with that, but I think the story was right but we tripped up because of our arrogance, which covered up a degree of sloppiness and let the government and other critics come in and the whole thing kicked off.”

Journalism’s gatekeeping function requires professionalism, not arrogance, Sambrook went on to say. Making decisions about what to report should be based on reassons, which should be open and transparent.

“If one of our journalists makes a statement on TV as a professional judgment, then I would hope they have some evidence or backing behind that to justify that - and by showing that evidence, the public can have faith in their professional judgment. If they just say ‘hey I’m a really clever person, I’m cleverer than you and I say this’, why would you trust them? I wouldn’t.”

See also:

• Comment is Free: Andrew Keen v Emily Bell: Is today’s internet killing our culture?

Edinburgh: ‘IPod moment’ could render print extinct, predicts Guardian editor

Posted by Colin Crummy on 25 August 2007 at 16:33
Tags: Channel 4, E-paper, Edinburgh 2007, Edinburgh International Television Festival, Guardian, ITN, Journalism, Podcasting

The newspaper industry could be rocked by its own “iPod moment” where a device reads text so well that renders print extinct, according to the editor of The Guardian.

At a session entitled “Who’ll Win the Web?” at the Edinburgh International Television Festival, Alan Rusbridger said: “For the newspaper there will be an iPod moment where someone creates a device that is so brilliant at reading text, the newspaper becomes irrelevant.”

Rusbridger also said the death of The Guardian in print would “in some ways make life simpler” and said that he was confident his team would continue to produce the product within the same Guardian spirit elsewhere. “I’d be quite relaxed about it,” he added.

He admitted that The Guardian was tying up people experimenting with podcasts that gained few listeners but said it was because the newspaper was experimenting with everything. “There’s a fair amount of wasted effort at the moment but we’re learning all the time.”

The debate centred on whether print media or broadcasters might prosper in the digital age.

Rod Henwood, new business director at Channel 4 said: “In some ways we are less threatened than newspapers because free broadcasters don’t have paying customers to lose. We have paying customers to gain through the internet.”

He said that broadcasters could better retain exclusivity on products in a way that news providers could not. “News is very much commodised on the net. Immersive, long form video entertainment is harder to commodise. For broadcasters that have got rights that are their own, have a chance to stand out on the internet more than purely news providers.”

ITN chief executive Mark Wood said newspapers were more than just news and it was crucial to make those elements – like lifestyle sections - pay in a multimedia strategy.

Rusbridger said: “The BBC, CNN, ITN – it’s sort of an article of faith that they are impartial and unbiased. We can be as impartial and biased as we like and on comment is free we have thousands of robust opinions.” He foresaw this as “an interesting battleground” which would be partly settled by regulator.

Indy joins monthly ABCe reporting

Posted by Martin Stabe on 6 August 2007 at 12:14
Tags: ABCe, Independent

The Independent’s web site will join its broadsheet rivals in revealing its ABCe web traffic figures each month, Revolution reported this week.

This is very good news — hopefully the other newspapers web sites will take the same approachh. So far only the Guardian, Sun, Times, and Telegraph reveal their ABCe-audited server-centric web site traffic data each month, and the lack of a uniform metric makes it difficult to make comparisons about the sites’ relative growth.

While no audited server log data is available for the Indy, user-centric data like that provided by online market research firm Nielsen/Netratings gives some indication of where the Indy stands in the online news universe.

According to Netratings, Independent.co.uk has a monthly UK audience of 706,000 — still furlongs behind Guardian Unlimited (2.37m), The Sun Online (1.98m), Times Online (1.73m) Telegraph.co.uk (1.59m) and even DailyMail.co.uk (1.1m).

Still, the Indy may have good reason to start revealing its audited web traffic figures. The Netratings data shows that Independent.co.uk could currently be Britain’s fastest-growing newspaper web site. Despite starting from a relatively low base, the Indy was up 54.5 per cent since last October, the first month Netratings figures were available.

Earlier this year, Indy editor-in-chief Simon Kelner told the Guardian that the site was being redesigned with “bells and whistles attached to it”. So watch this space.

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!

Fake Sheikh to quit?

Posted by Martin Stabe on 26 June 2007 at 07:35
Tags: News of the World

The Independent’s Pandora column today suggests that the News of the World’s controvertial investigations editor, Mazher Mahmood, may have explored the option of taking voluntary redundancy amid the current round of cutbacks at News International.

The Fake Sheikh, the Indy diary claims, “has been in aborted talks with management over a package to hang up his robes”.

An anonymous source talls Oliver Duff: “He discussed voluntary redundancy, but they didn’t want him to go. He is too valuable.”

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.

FOI win may give more details of MPs’ expenses

Posted by Martin Stabe on 15 June 2007 at 12:35
Tags: Freedom of Information, Sunday Telegraph

The Information Commissioner has ruled that more details of MPs’ expenses must be disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act, in a move that is likely to raise a few eyebrows in Westminster, given the recent failure of David Maclean’s “squalid little bill” to exempt Parliament from FOI.

The decision notice (PDF) states that the total amounts claimed by some MPs under the “additional cost allowance”, which is used to reclaim expenses of running a home closer to Westminster than their constituency, must be disclosed under specific headings including “mortgage costs”, “hotel expenses” and so on.

The decision, made earlier this week, but only released today, followed requests from the various journalists. Ben Leapman of the Sunday Telegraph writes that an appeal by the Commons authorities to the Information Tribunal is likely, however.

Had it passed, the Maclean bill would have blocked precisely this sort or request to the House of Commons.

The Commissioner said that the public has a right to know expenses claimed by MPs in relation to their public duties.

In a press release about the decision, the ICO said: “The Information Commissioner does not believe it is necessary to disclose the full itemised details of expenditure on the running of a MP’s private household. To do so would invade the privacy of MPs and their families.”

Meanwhile, another private members bill is worth keeping an eye on: tabled by Lib Dem MP Tom Brake, the Freedom of Information (Amendment) (No. 2) Bill would actually strengthen the FOI Act. The Campaign for Freedmom of Information’s blog has full details, and Robert Verkaik wrote it up in the Indy this morning.

Update: More context on this decision from Martin Rosenbaum at the BBC

Update 2.10pm: Heather Brooke is not impressed with the ICO’s “regulation by press release” and says the decision resulted from an appeal that she had filed with the ICO. It certainly seems as though she’s been scooped on the decision affecting her own request because of the way it was released — by registered mail to her and by e-mail and RSS to the rest of the media. Martin Rosenbaum has had similar experiences.

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