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:
- Localisation - Good news for the regional press, because there will be greater focus on customising news by location.
- Personalisation - Mobile and other personal gateways will become the preferred medium tailored to the individuals
- Enablers - Rather than handing down pearls of wisdom, and will provide practical help and user-generated
- Double media - Video and text will not be enough. They want to read as the watch.
- 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.
