Search results matching tag 'The Guardian'

Media among the casualties of Observer restructure

1641923 — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:42:00 GMT

Coverage of the UK media business will be among the casualties of the upcoming restructure at The Observer in 2010.

As details of the cost-cutting drive at one of the country’s oldest national newspapers start to emerge, it transpires the Business & Media section will be folded into the main paper.

It will be a loss to the British media industry and signals a seismic change for The Observer, which has had a separate Business section for more than 30 years.

It comes a year after The Independent closed its Monday media supplement, which had run for four years in competition with The Guardian.

Both moves appear to be an ominous reflection of the current UK media landscape, which has been hit hard by a sluggish jobs market and the ensuing loss of classified recruitment ads.

In addition, print circulations continue to fall while the emergence of nimbler, online competitors now take large chunks out of any remaining business.

Those in the industry will have noticed The Observer’s media coverage has been on the slide for some time, but the upcoming changes are set to have dramatic repercussions.

In addition to the Business & Media section disappearing, the personal finance coverage in The Observer’s Cash section is also folding. The paper will endeavour to continue some sort of coverage of both sectors in the main paper, while the travel-based Escape section will be subsumed into an expanded Observer magazine.

The Observer has also announced plans to close three of its monthly magazines - Observer Sport Monthly, Observer Music Monthly and Observer Woman.

More than 100 of GN&M’s 1,700 editorial and commercial jobs are set to go in the latest attempt to reverse “unsustainable” losses, leaving a much-reduced £2 Sunday offering.

Meanwhile, GNM has once again sent emails to staff encouraging them to consider working part-time, taking a sabbatical or applying for voluntary redundancy.

Further changes are set to follow, with parent Guardian Media Group’s CEO Carolyn McCall, admitting "We are midway through a process”.

Sad day for The Observer, but it is spared closure

255762 — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 08:53:00 GMT

When the fate of some newspapers is to disappear for good Guardian News & Media's decision to pare down The Observer to four sections rather than close it outright was clearly a tough one in this climate, but it makes a lot of sense and it should be congratulated.

As reported last night The Observer will shrink from seven to four sections having been under threat of closure since August. Its sport, music and Woman monthly magazines will close and there will be some redundancies.

Guardian News & Media said it will fold the business and personal finance sections into the main paper, and the travel section into the Observer Magazine. Only Observer Food Monthly will survive the magazine cull.

Hopefully the resulting newspaper will be smaller, but perfectly formed. Besides, I'd rather have a paper like the Observer on Sunday or frankly The Guardian that doesn't suffer from over publishing that to my mind afflicts some Sunday newspapers where I am left asking "what is the point of this section – could you remind me (other than to recycle".

Paring The Observer down to the bare essentials described above still makes it a better paper than the Independent on Sunday (it is still publishing, right?) and The Sunday Times, which is a paper that can be best described as: "used to be pretty good".

The best Sunday paper is still the Guardian on Saturday as like a trip to Parisa it’s a two day affair.

It is a shame about the magazines as the Observer team did a great job producing them, but again there was always the nagging question in my mind as to whether that was what it should have been spending its money on. Yes they were good, but I was never sure whether they belonged in a Sunday newspaper (that could just be me, it is not unknown). The food mag is awesome though and I'm glad to see that continue.

I could say more, but really I'm glad to see the paper continue.

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Rio Ferdinand, media futurologist

1716484 — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 15:09:00 GMT

In a surreal moment, the respected media analyst and futurologist Rio Ferdinand has linked the fact that the England-Ukraine match is going to be online pay-per-view to the recent claim that internet advertising has ‘overtaken’ TV advertising:

"I read that online advertising has taken over from TV”, he apparently said, “so that tells you something about where it's going in terms of the digital world…So I’m sure it'll be the way forward and in the future it'll probably be the reality. I think it's a good way to gauge how many people are interested."

If ever the IAB’s claims needed a dose of credibility, surely this is it.

But Rio is not alone, unlike how he sometimes finds himself in the box. Among others, Marketing took a deep breath and declared ‘England game heralds future of sport on web’.

On the flipside is this from Janine Gibson, Guardian.co.uk editor, who disagrees it is a prophetic moment and explained why The Guardian declined the offer to screen the match:

“You had to sign up to an enormous amount of editorial endorsement and promotion for something that we weren’t convinced was of particular value to our users and would feel like a fake endorsement of a one-off match. This isn’t heralding the beginning of a new dawn; it’ll never happen again and it feels slightly opportunistic.”

She obviously needs to have a chat with Rio.

But over and above all this is the fact that the match being delivered by the internet might be interesting and contentious now, but once TV sets are fully broadband enabled it won’t really matter. Viewers won’t care how it is getting to their screens. It is all TV and they will hopefully have the experience they want.

It is unsurprising that England football fans are in uproar over the fact that the match is being screened via an online TV service and not on broadcast TV. They can still see it if they want to, but not the way they’d like to.

Amid all the fuss, we should remember that the game was originally contracted to appear on broadcast TV (with Setanta) and, if it had been an important game with something at stake, it probably still would be. I can’t see a match England actually need to win or a World Cup Final going online only pay-per-view – although maybe a new series of Rio’s World Cup Wind-Ups would be ok. It is a fairly unique set of circumstances that have lead us here.

The fan forums I’ve looked at are less concerned with the idea of paying to watch it, though, than they are with a delivery system that means they can’t watch it in the pub or on the big screen in the living room and have to crowd round their laptops or watch it individually instead.

They demand the shared experience that only TV can give them. But having failed to agree rights with a broadcast TV company, it is understandable (or maybe greedy) that the agency responsible for this match – Kentaro – looked for an alternative buyer. The end result might not be as good as broadcast TV but it is better than nothing. Still, that is scant consolation for fans.

The fact that newspapers are so keen to become broadcasters – with the Times and Sun being among those who will show the match – is really interesting but not new. They already have various bits of video content on their websites, but this football match is one of the few pieces of roughly ‘must-have’ TV content they can get access to. TV broadcasters show appointment to view programming all day every day and newspapers clearly would like a piece of the action.

I suppose the main concern for fans that do choose to pay to watch the match is how well the UK’s internet pipes will handle demand. The fact that the number of viewers has been capped at one million worryingly shows how unprepared the UK broadband infrastructure is for major transmission of big events. It needs upgrading, as Digital Britain pointed out, and TV companies are as anxious as anybody to get an additional digital network to digital broadcasting. How is it going to cope when the majority of people are watching TV in HD, or with the other resource-hungry innovations like 3D coming along?

A graph that made me laugh

1368741 — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 16:17:00 GMT

I’m supposed to be having a day off. Fat chance.

You might have noticed a story put out by our cousins at the IAB that claims online advertising has now overtaken TV to become the ‘biggest single advertising medium in the UK’ (by spend). We find the IAB’s story odd because the internet is not a single anything; it is a fantastic technology that is home to many different marketing activities that do different things. It even delivers TV. It is a pretty meaningless statistic but it has garnered plenty of headlines and no small amount of apocalyptic predictions. Journalists expect us to respond, so here I am blogging instead of planting my daffs.

As I have said many times before, I love the internet. I love the way that it complements TV – nothing else works better. I love the way people can respond instantly to TV ads via search and websites; I love the way social media helps make the buzz around TV programmes so visible and so much more fun. I’m happy for online advertising to increase - so long as it is not at TV’s expense. And so far it isn’t. (I can almost hear your eyebrows rising at this point).

That’s the depressing part of this story; the implication that online advertising is taking broadcast TV’s money is just not true. Last year broadcast TV spot advertising declined 2.9% compared to total advertising declines of 4.2% and display declines of 5%. Not the spectacular share growth of online maybe but growth nonetheless and in the horrific ad market that is 2009 the same pattern is emerging; TV and online are increasing their shares, mostly at the expense of print and DM, though print remains the biggest overall advertising medium, not online.

If the IAB can’t resist making comparisons with TV then the fairest would be to compare all forms of online display with all forms of broadcast TV - spot, sponsorship, AFP, Interactive etc. - not an easy number to get hold of because TV has never bothered to lump its own advertising revenues together. TV would never try to compare itself with any form of classified advertising, DM or search because it wouldn’t make any sense.

Anyway, Thinkbox’s thoughts on this are already out there so I won’t repeat them all here.

But I would like to draw your attention to The Guardian’s coverage of the story today. They produced a little graph that made me laugh (it isn't online though). Along the x axis we had a list of advertising sectors, each with a bar representing revenue that got a bit taller as it went along. We had cinema, radio (spot only), business magazines, consumer magazines, directories, outdoor, national newspapers, press classified, direct mail, regional newspapers, press display, television (spot only), and then…internet. Just internet. No more explanation than that.

We think these numbers would be more meaningfully represented in one of two ways, either by technology/platform or by the genuine distinctive advertising sectors . We’ve had a go, based just on the IAB’s figures. Take your pick.

Economist is a natural for paid content

255762 — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 10:39:00 GMT

On hearing the news this morning that The Economist is to charge for news content across its site I was wondering why they waited so long.

The Economist is a natural for paid content in the same way that the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times are. They are likely to end up being select members of a very small paid content club. With the power of the distinctive Economist brand and loyal readership (talking of, which check Campaign's "How the Economist changed tack to attract new readers"), I think it can successfully leverage the kind of analysis and insight it offers in to a paid content model.

The Economist.com website currently gives away its news and charges for its archive in the way that the New York Times once did. I'm betting that was not a huge money spinner.

Yvonne Ossman, publisher of The Economist, who confirmed the move to Media Week says they looked at a number of payment options, including an iTunes-style micropayment model. It's going to be interesting to see how this works and how quickly they get it going.

She also says that she's not "sure others will follow suit". She's right about that, of course, as mostly newspapers can't charge as much as some might like.

The most interesting development around at the moment for newspapers seems to be the club idea that The Guardian, The New York Times and others are exploring. The idea seems to be gaining ground.

Steve Outing has a blog post on how Fox News personality Bill O’Reilly (yes he of much right-wing Republican nuttiness) and his team have created something called the BillOreilly.com Premium Membership package (there are 16 reasons to become a member, apparently).

While the website for his show 'The O'Reilly Factor' is mostly free, he is now offering more for serious O’Reilly fans. Some of those people are very serious -- although shouldn't always be taken as such. O'Reilly and his people are serious as well as -- he's charging $49.95 a year or $4.95 a month (must be why there are 16 reasons to sign up).

As Outing says, "this is exactly the model that many newspaper and magazine publishers have been talking about lately, though many are having trouble figuring out what they’ve got that they can charge for".

Would love to write more, but boy am I suffering from a double whammy: right finger recovering from dislocation and now struck by man flu (I don't think its swine flu, but don't get too close).

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Is the Mail Online heading for domination with change to moderation policy?

255762 — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 11:01:00 GMT

The news today that the Mail Online is to stop checking user comments before they go live could not only make it the most visited website in the UK, but possibly the one with the largest and most active community. A potentially very powerful combination.

New Media Age is reporting that Associated Newspapers plans to end its long standing policy of pre-moderation. It is, I think, concerns aside, a smart move.

The Mail Online has already stolen the crown of the UK's most visited newspaper website after it boosted traffic in June by 19% and in doing so, attracted over 29m users.

This saw it leapfrogging the Telegraph.co.uk and the Guardian.co.uk to become the most popular UK national newspaper site.

Its stories already attract a large amount of comments (this considering that some - we don't know how many - never get published for various reasons) and it is not uncommon to see articles on its homepage with several hundred comments.

The NMA article looks at some of the problems that ending pre-moderation could pose. There's the issue of what it could do to advertisers who suddenly find themselves next to offensive or legally problematic comments.

It is definitely a cause for concern, but it should be one that a well-funded newspaper website with an active loyal readership should be able to deal with.

One of the problems with pre-moderation is the wait. It can kill debate or the desire to debate. If people don't see their comment go up pretty swiftly they are more likely to be deterred from further interaction. That can hit traffic as well.

The only other title of note out there doing post moderation is the Guardian and it can get many hundreds of comments on its news and blogs posts. The Daily Express and Daily Star also post moderate, but there are so few comments on these sites that it is hardly any kind of comparison. It's lead story had eight comments and a quick look around did not uncover a vast amount of interaction.

A quick tally of this morning's homepages shows, even with moderation still in place, the Mail Online has the most comments. Its lead Baby P story had 113 comments; The Guardian with its jump in unemployment story had 60; the lead story on The Times Online (also unemployment) had one; and the Telegraph doesn't have comments on any of its stories.

Not exactly scientific, and to be fair Times Online has plenty of older stories with a high number of comments (its most commented from yesterday had 106).

All that said it will be very interesting to see what switching to a post moderation system does for the Mail Online. If the number of comments it is receiving with moderation is already high, with post moderation like the Guardian it could rocket. This will have interesting implications for its traffic, which could also receive a boost and perhaps helping to cement its position as the most visited on and commented upon website.

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Desperate measures: closing The Observer

255762 — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 08:47:00 GMT

Let's hope it is the nuclear option and it does not come to Guardian Media Group having to close The Observer newspaper. It would be tragic loss and would lead many people to have few options on a Sunday.

Guardian Media Group chief executive, Carolyn McCall, has confirmed in a memo that executives are looking at all options to cut growing losses, including closing The Observer, to ensure the future of The Guardian. As that's what the Scott Trust is in business to do.

GMG will have to make some really tough choices. Advertising revenues are falling and it looks like these will not return to pre-downturn levels. The Guardian Media Group has losses in the 12 months to March of £90m. Those are serious losses and require serious action. A smattering of job cuts and merging web operations of the Guardian and The Observer clearly do not go far enough in addressing the scale of the problem. Otherwise we wouldn't be here.

The Observer might sell 409,000 plus copies, but its circulation is falling and there are no signs that its decline will be arrested. This is not a market where we are going to see sustained rises in newspaper circulation that are anything more than quick hits based on short term promotions or news cycles.

So what to do? People don't often close newspapers, but it happens that it just hasn't happened for a long while.

If you do a search or think back there is a veritable pile of dead papers filling the bins of prosperity. The News on Sunday, Eddie Shah's Today and The Post, London Daily News, The Sunday Correspondent and Sunday Business. Admittedly some of those did not last very long and certainly have not been in continuous publication since the latter part of the 18th century.

In the current downturn, more pertinent (if smaller in circulation) are names like the Christian Science Monitor, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Rocky Mountain News, which have all gone in the US while others teeter on the brink. There are many other smaller titles that have also folded, but what is important here is that at no other time in post-war history have so many newspapers fallen so quickly.

If The Observer went it would be the biggest casualty in terms of circulation so far. It is also arguable a more important newspaper than many of those mentioned above. More than that it is a good newspaper (are there still great newspapers?) and to lose it would leave few choices of an alternative come Sunday.

The Independent on Sunday is so poor that it hardly bears mentioning. It has been deserted by so many of its once loyal readers. Its circulation is down 2.98% month on month to 162,474.

No Guardian reader will be reading the Sunday Telegraph so that only leaves The Sunday Times or not buying a paper at all.

An option also on the table is a slimmed down version of the Observer. I'm not basing this on any research, I'm shooting my keyboard off, but when it comes to Sunday newspapers there is a reasonable amount that I can live without.

The question if you are Carolyn McCall, Alan Rushbridger and the gang is what would readers happily live without, but continue to buy The Observer.

The staples of any Sunday newspaper are news (from home/foreign/business), sport, culture and a magazine. The rest is up for debate. If my copy of the Observer suddenly came sans personal finance, travel and seven day TV listings I would not be unhappy. I would still buy the paper. Even slimmed down, and with the Guardian behind it, the title would be better than the limp and exhausted Independent on Sunday.

Turning some of these weekly supplements into monthly supplements might be an option. Rotating these non-core sections in the same way that Guardian News & Media currently does with its Sport, Music, Food and Women magazines (all excellent) might be an option as would axing or combining one or more of those magazines.

The option of turning the paper into a weekly magazine seems like some kind of after thought in an effort to keep the brand alive. I'm not sure about that option. The effort should be, where reasonably possible, to keep the Observer going.

If it closes then I would rather see some of those elements of the paper transferred to the Saturday Guardian. It is already a powerful package, but making Saturday even stronger would not only prop up the Saturday paper, but it would probably eliminate the need to buy a paper on Sunday should The Observer no longer published. Fingers crossed that this is not the case.

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Life in the clickstream: the future of journalism

255762 — Thu, 28 May 2009 11:00:00 GMT

Everyone who works online and has anything to do with publishing should be reading this. A report out today that attempts to map the carnage in publishing and take a guess at the future. Full of good nuggets.

With nods to both the Guardian's Emily Bell ("We are on the brink of two years of carnage for western media") and Roy Greenslade ("Popular newspapers, the mass newspapers, are dying and will die") the starting point and the narrative of the Future of Journalism report produced by the Media Alliance in Australia is the declining fortunes of print and the challenges that disruptive technologies bring in the Australian, UK and US markets.

The starring names of this story are all there as papers like the The Christian Science Monitor fold, as others like the Washington Post, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and CNN rise to the challenge.

No one is immune and while no one is sure exactly what the solutions are, people do know that one thing's for sure: that news media has fundamentally changed and that publishing has to adapt to "the economic and technological landscape".

The companies that will survive and prosper will be those that remember and nurture their core business, which also have the journalists on board who are equipped with the skills to flourish in the new landscape. For the journalists, it is the ones with those skills who will prosper. Hopefully.

The investment question is as important as the question of what content we actually produce.

The report asks a lot of questions about content (it is after all what we do) and provides some answers: where are people going online and what are people doing? It looks at the kinds of content they are consuming and what that tells us.

There are some really good case studies here which offer a pick 'n' mix smorgasbord of options for publishers to choose from and experiment with. Not everything is going to work.

It takes a brief look at CNN's IReport mini-site devoted to user-generated content, which has been a real success for CNN. The news giant has learned well to adapt and ride the Web 2.0 wave like the best. Its success with UGC and other experiments like Twitter offer a lot.

It takes a look at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "where quotas rule".

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution restructured in 2007, targeted older reporters and editors for redundancy and divided those left into two main sections: news and information, with about 170 journalists who break news; and enterprise, with about 50 staff concentrating on features and investigations.

It then imposed controversial quotas on reporters: 60 pieces a year for narrative and profile writers, and 12 for investigative reporters.

The UK is well represented in this report and The Daily Telegraph is billed as the original "newsroom of the future". There is a quote from the paper's digital editor Edward Roussel who is worth repeating with his line that the new era calls for a new type of reporter, with the attributes of a wire journalist or a sports reporter.

"If you imagine the way a football reporter works, filing grabs every few minutes and then turning the whole thing into a story very quickly after the end of the game, that is the way our reporters work now when filing for online."

Roussel is also a believer (and really who isn't) in Jeff Jarvis's belief that success lies in premium content and that we must all live by this maxim: "Do what you do best and link to the rest".

Johnston Press' The Lancashire Evening Post and its "converged newsroom" is here with its newsroom seen as a model as to what regional newspapers can do. Its newsroom has evolved to use Sony HD video cameras, Edirol digital recorders, Soundslide for galleries and Avid Pro Express for editing videos. The Post, and its 65 editorial staff, blossomed into lep.co.uk.

Online content is discussed at every conference. Lep.co.uk publishes stories continuously and most stories appear online first. "We have the market to ourselves as a regional newspaper, so we can control our content, which is a bit different to our national papers," says Post's deputy editor, Mike Hill.

The convergence of journalism and data is looked at in EveryBlock.com. This site is the brainchild of former Washington Post journalist Adrian Holovaty. Working for the Post in Chicago, he set up chicagocrime.org to analyse daily crime reports from the Chicago Police Department’s website and reorganised the information so people could see what was happening in their neighbourhood. Now with Everyblock no matter where you live you can see what's happening with on your block - it is local news at the micro level and another example of the rise of community sites. Database-inspired journalism is much bigger in the US, but offers untapped opportunities here and elsewhere.

Bloggers on steroids/the rise of community journalism- the community model is seen as the way forward by some and a red herring by others. The report looks at in the journalist-free news operation: Examiner.com.

Examiner.com is owned and run by the Clarity Media Group in Denver, Colorado, and also runs freesheets in cities including San Francisco, Washington and Baltimore. It is owned by billionaire Philip Anschutz and run by former AOL executive Michael Sherrod. The group has domain names for hyperlocal sites in 70 US cities and has officially launched in beta in San Francisco, Chicago, Baltimore, Denver, and Seattle (all markets where the paid for print titles are risk and folding like the San Francisco Chronicle and the late Seattle Post Intelligencer). Almost following the scent of print death.

The idea behind Examiner.com is pure citizen journalism with contributions from examiners paid by numbers of page views and advertising clicks (not unlike the model used by Nick Denton at Gawker Media). The pay starts at $2.50 for every thousand page views and, according to TechCrunch, the median income is $25 a month. Not exactly a future career.

"We are building a community of Examiners to focus on specific topics ranging from sports to tourism to local politics," a post on the website said recently. "Examiners are local experts who have a voice, knowledge and an opinion. Think of an Examiner like a blogger on steroids."

And so to The Washington Post, which has long been seen as a pioneer. The report looks at some of the Post's work on video, which again offers a lot of ideas. The speed and focus is impressive.

Jim Brady, Washingtonpost.com executive editor, says his team were poor relations in the pecking order until recently, but that has all changed.

Brady said the Post had introduced comprehensive training and all reporters could shoot video, which – he said – was "the hot thing now".

"We have a political blogger out there who has a camera mounted on his computer and when a big story breaks he will do the 60 seconds on what this means, and he will push a button on his computer, send it to our computer guys and 10 minutes later there will be a video of him up there reacting to Teddy Kennedy having a brain tumour … it is totally crappy video, it is a webcam, but it gets it out there.

Brady adds: "Production values are not everything – communicating simple information is what matters. You might get 10,000 video streams for something that took 90 seconds to make."

The Washingtonpost.com has six dedicated video journalists who make everything from documentary-style stories to three minute campaign reports. They are part of a team of about 100 dedicated online journalists who prepare copy from the print operation, moderate blogs, produce video and podcasts and produce original stories.

Niche for news junkies. Here the report quotes the American Journalism Review's Philip Meyer who recently envisaged a “smaller, less frequently published version, packed with analysis and investigative reporting and aimed at well-educated news junkies, that may well be a smart survival strategy for the beleaguered old print product".

That sounds like a description of a news magazine as much as it does a newspaper. The model is the same - as long as what you offer is the best in your field representing premium value to advertisers then you will find a market.

Ownership and partnerships are looked at as the report concludes. Both hot topics. Will US newspapers like the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times become grand old charitable trusts?

What new partners do we need to find, and does this mean looking in areas where you may not have looked before as being 'frenemies' becomes the new norm as companies join rivals in joint ventures, each contributing what they do best.

This report comes in the same week that the World Association of Newspapers had its conference (issued this: Newspaper Circulation Grows Despite Economic Downturn) and both see reasons to be optimistic as they look to the future where many models, new and old, look like they will co-exist. This will doubtless mean that a lot less trees will be needed.

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New York Times one of the few that can thrive in a digital age

255762 — Thu, 14 May 2009 12:03:00 GMT

John Gapper in the FT today has a good piece on the woes of the New York Times, but he says the Gray Lady is one of the "few print publications with a good chance of thriving in the digital age".

It has been a helluva week for the New York Times as mogul David Geffen emerged as someone being interested in buying a stake in the New York Times Company and elsewhere it was speculated by Gawker that Mexican billionaire, Carlos Slim, could become the biggest shareholder in the New York Times in the next couple of years because of the high interest rates the Ochs-Sulzberger family borrowed $250m at.

Gapper says that while it must be tempting for Arthur Sulzberger Junior to sell up, he says that unlike the Bancroft family who cashed in two years ago and sold the Wall Street Journal to Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation, he should hang on.

"The family should learn from its mistakes by holding on to the enterprise long enough to clean up its balance sheet and put the paper on a solid footing. Then it should retire with dignity by selling it to someone with sharper instincts.

"Despite the financial errors of the controlling family, The New York Times is not just another doomed US city paper. It is one of the few print publications with a good chance of thriving in the digital age."

He has some praise for the Ochs-Sulzbergers. This for instance, he says they are better publishers than media owners, which has seen them turn a city paper into a national and global brand with a loyal, affluent readership in print and online.

Compare that to the Graham family and The Washington Post, which has lost some of its heyday cache as it has become more local and less an international force.

Talking of newspaper brands that have made a global impact, The Guardian always gets a mention here. Not always like this though as Gapper takes a swipe in his piece, which seems harsh.

"Meanwhile, it [The New York Times] produces more original stories than most rivals put together. The UK’s Guardian is another paper that has built a global brand from what was a regional paper, but it relies more on cut-and- pasting (or aggregating) from others."

Looking towards the future what the paper really needs he says is an owner to best exploit its power and reputation as a force in journalism on and offline. Big question: is that owner person a Mexican telecoms billionaire such as Slim or an entertainment mogul such as Geffen? What does Geffen want with the paper anyway? The kind of owner it needs Gapper says is another billionaire, Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg.

"Bloomberg, who is demonstrably attached to New York, has entrepreneurial and financial talent, has a track record of cultivating rigorous and independent journalism, and knows how to profit from digital subscriptions."

What one wonders could Bloomberg do with the New York Times and its digital business? Could he turn a profit? Would he even be interested? All questions for the (near) future.

For now the Ochs-Sulzberger family control 89% of the voting shares, which is a fortress of power, but that fortress is well and truly under assault.

One more thing, I mean really why does the New York Times have 1,300 editorial staff (compared this to the FT which has 550 or The Guardian which will have 800 by the end of the year). Who can survive with those numbers in this digital age?

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People will pay for content, says PwC

255762 — Tue, 12 May 2009 11:19:00 GMT

That's what PricewaterhouseCoopes says in its 'Outlook for Newspaper Publishing in the Digital Age' report out today.

The report looks at how the newspaper industry can face up to the structural challenges that have seen paid for titles lose circulation volume while advertisers have been moving online.

The top line findings from its research shows mostly importantly two points that applies across the online publishing world and not simply to newspapers.

Consumers will pay for content - News as commodity - Consumers see breaking news and general interest news as commodities, but there is always a market for high value online content in specific topics. Our consumer research indicates that consumers are willing to pay for this content, but newspapers need to develop strategies for monetising their content and intellectual capital.

Niche Niche Niche - Niche audiences continue to demand specialised, targeted and relevant information. This creates both an opportunity for advertisers to reach their consumers and for newspapers to develop 'hyper-local' or 'local-local' sites addressing content at the neighborhood and suburban level. This is particularly prevalent in the USA.

This supports what people have been talking about this last week, which I have been blogging about and what seems to be the new consensus: that you can (as some still do) charge for B2B and specialist content (as Carolyn McCall highlighted last week) as this is content that people can not get elsewhere.

Here are PwC's other key points which point to the huge role that print still has to play in the future of newspapers (again I think this applies pretty well to magazines as well). This role has become ever more apparent as the print pounds have translated to digital pennies.

Revenue remain with print - Although there is a huge potential for growth online, print remains the largest source of revenue generation for newspaper publishers, and will continue to be so for some time.

The future is longterm - Newspapers have a long-term future and will coexist with other media. However this is unlikely to be either in the formats or volumes seen today and there will some casualties and losses of well-known papers along the way.

Where the value is - Consumers place high value on the deep insight and analysis provided by journalists over and above general or breaking news stories.

Trust and loyalty - Newspapers have been able to earn their readers' trust and loyalty, giving them the opportunity to both lead and follow audiences as they migrate online and into the use of portable electronic media. Indeed, with the core principles of deep analysis and trusted editorial, the medium is secondary to the brand.

Multimedia - Use of video in online news sites gives the feel of a ‘TV-like’ experience (consumers’ favourite medium for news) giving newspaper brands the opportunity to secure online audiences beyond their print readership and into the television audience more generally.

New business models - Newspaper publishers have responded to the economic downturn by increasing their focus on cost reduction. Many are also using multiple platforms and new technologies as channels for content distribution in order to reach their audiences. However, many have still to fully review their existing business models to take full advantage of the innovation in the marketplace and the demands of consumers.

The mobile internet - The rapid adoption of the internet and mobile technology have created a market for mobile devices – particularly for the 'net generation', those under 35 in age. Though the devices give immediate access to breaking news and information, they are low on the list of preferences for accessing information due to the difficulty of reading content on the devices.

Innovative advertising packages - Shift For advertisers, access to mass markets remains key, so major newspaper brands with large loyal customer bases will be high on the spending plans of advertisers. The overall shift from print to online will continue however, so newspaper publishers must continue to develop innovative advertising packages combining both print and online to secure the advertising spend for their brands.

PwC's key questions for publishers as they look to the future:

Is your brand identity clear - both internally and externally - and focused on what differentiates you from your competitors?
Are print and new media run as separate operations or as simply two different distribution mechanisms for the same core activity?
Do you have an integrated paper and online advertising sales team?
Are you using online to extend your core audience beyond the traditional print readership?
Will video journalism and print journalism co-exist online?
What does your audience want from you - and do you know what they will pay for?
Can areas of non-differentiation be outsourced?
Have you identified non-core activities that should be downsized or stopped?
Are you investing today with?

You can read the full report here:

There was this also out from PricewaterhouseCoopers looking more at insolvency, but some interesting bits particularly liked its interesting turn of phrase where it says that "the internet has turned into a burden not a prize" for some media companies.

Clearly here PwC is talking about the large scale investment in digital that has not brought anything like the return hoped for as all those print pounds are traded for digital pennies.

The consultancy firm says that digital assets that were acquired as an option for future gain will move down, if not off, the priority list and for some the internet has turned into a burden not a prize.

However, it does see opportunities ahead "for those who provide a great experience based on quality content accessible across a range of devices". I'm guessing this is more than about the development of a pretty iPhone app.

For publishers, the report goes on to say that their trajectory has been only marginally impacted by the recent downturn (with a 40% rise in insolvencies since Q1 2008) and instead has been hit far harder by the structural challenge of consumption moving to online models than by the recession itself.

David Lancefield, partner, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, said: "The move towards Digital Britain could exasperate this trend even further unless publishers can shift their focus to new operating models."

Elsewhere in the report, it gives a familiar grim view of the advertising market and says insolvencies are rocketing (now doubling pre-credit crunch levels) with nearly 70 ad agencies registering insolvent in Q1 2009 - 62% higher than this time last year.

But again there is some online brightness. It says that while traditional media advertising is in double digit decline, online advertising is offering some glimmer of hope.

While it agrees that consumers are being careful about where they spend their money (whether on subscriptions, downloads or events), it says the structural change from analogue to digital distribution and offline to online migration present a significant threat but also opportunity.

"With consumer confidence at its lowest, the country turned a corner into a technical recession early 2009 – this shift was reflected in the advertising industry, as a third more agencies became insolvent than in the previous quarter. Last year represented the advertising world’s Big Bang, as we saw a collision of severe economic downturn and structural change to online. In this world, grabbing and monetising consumer attention is harder than ever," Lancefield said.

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