Search results matching tag 'Trinity Mirror'

Hard to figure out hyperlocal business model says New York Times

255762 — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 10:07:00 GMT

The New York Times has given an update on its hyperlocal experiment and says that while the content is flowing it has "been harder to figure out the business model".

In one of its regular Talk to The Times slots Jim Schachter, editor for digital initiatives, spoke about hyperlocals and the New NY Times pilot, called The Local, in response to a question from Lynn Smith, a former Los Angeles Times journalist.

Schachter said that The Local (the NY Times has two: one in Brooklyn's Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, the other in the New Jersey towns of South Orange, Maplewood and Millburn) had been what a pilot is supposed to be: "a learning experience for us on every front".

Each of the NY Times hyperlocal projects is led by a full-time Metro reporter who has a dual role of covering stories and finding ways to help those communities to cover themselves.

On that front Schachter that both Locals had been a successes with local contributors coming forward and producing more than half of the posts on each site. This has turned out to be the easy bit.

He said citizen journalists were doing things as varied as covering meetings, analysing data, creating Google maps, making videos and writing a variety of columns and blogs.

"People in the news business talk all the time about “increasing reader engagement” as a key to our future success. I can’t think of any better measure of engagement than the frequency with which readers actually undertake to report the news and create high-quality content to share with one another," Schachter said.

But on the other front, of turning these pilots into viable businesses, the NY Times is having less success.

"Not surprisingly, it has been harder to figure out the business model for all of this. An explosion of interest among local merchants in advertising on hyperlocal sites has been just around the corner for a number of years now."

But despite that Schachter said that the hyperlocal advertising market is a hard one for an "established organisation like The Times to enter; for now, the potential revenues don’t match up very well with the cost of acquiring customers, even using a low-cost system like self-service advertising".

He said the Times was looking at other ideas for generating revenue streams from its hyperlocal efforts and that it has the support of the New York Times Company to explore this further.

The lack of revenues is not stopping more and more players entering the market. With expansion in places like Seattle where Fisher Communications has launched 44 hyperlocal sites in the Seattle area and 38 in Oregon making it the largest in the US.

Hyperlocal website WikiCity was recently snapped up by Nebraskan newspaper group The Omaha World-Herald.

MSNBC has Everyblock.com which sits alongside other established players big and small such as Patch.com and Baristanet.

In the coming months more and more players will enter this market in the US not to mention the UK where the interest (from the likes of Guardian News & Media, Associated Newspapers and Trinity Mirror) and challenges in making hyperlocal work are similar.

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Hyperlocal; a goldmine or fool's gold?

255762 — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 10:27:00 GMT

Fast Company takes a look at the hyperlocal market that everyone is watching, which some say is a multi-billion dollar future of online, but might not amount to anything much more than a sizeable pile of nickels.

The projections say, according to Borrell Associates, that the hyperlocal market could (one day) be worth $15bn by 2013. Whether they happen or not, the big numbers are enough to attract the likes of The New York Times Company (the Local) and AOL (Patch) in the US and the likes of Newsquest, Trinity Mirror and Associated Newspapers in the UK.

But whether that cash will materialise is another question, considering how the growth rate for online advertising is not the steam train it once was.

The thing with Hyperlocal as Fast Company points out is that it is lauded by many, but success always "remains perpetually around the corner". The reason for this according to Mark Josephson, CEO of the hyperlocal aggregator Outside.in is that local advertisers are not online in force, but he insists they will be.

The piece also quotes Debbie Galant who runs Baristanet, one of the models for hyperlocal (championed by Jeff Jarvis), as saying only that they are making "real money" and that "ad revenue is six figures", but she won't go into more detail than that – probably because after costs there is not a lot left.

This growth in hyperlocal revenues is dependent upon a number of things. One is local advertisers ditching the Yellow Pages and local newspapers on mass, those mom and pop advertisers, which are not exactly overflowing with local classified advertising (anyone remember craigslist?).

Add to that their is an increasing amount of competition. The New York Times Co's Local project is going up against established local sites as well as the likes of Baristanet and Brownstoner in New York and Examiner.com, which has domains for sites in 70 US cities. The San Diego News Network is another established hyperlocal player, but look what is happening in that city. The San Diego Union-Tribune newspaper is to cut 112 jobs and says it too will focus on more local community news and advertising. It doesn't look like there are enough ad dollars to go around, which is part of the problem already.

For bigger advertisers to come in the hyperlocal market is also dependent upon sites having the right content to attract them. Local crime and townhall stories are not typically the kind of thing that many brands what to hook up with, but it is a catch 22, to develop other content takes time and more importantly staff -- something of a problem today for America's struggling local media as papers close and jobs are cut.

The conundrum about hyperlocal appears to be that it can be profitable if you employ next to no one and your content is user generated and free, but if it is user generated and free then the quality and appeal of that content becomes an issue.

Fast Company quotes Jim Schachter, editor of digital initiatives at the New York Times, as saying: "We're talking about several hundred thousand dollars a year in personnel costs. I don't think the local digital-advertising market anywhere would cover those costs."

With those costs in mind, The NY Times plans – if its experiment proves successful – to license the Local's platform to bloggers in other towns across the US who would like to be associated with the Times.

"We could help those people mobilize their communities and gather local-advertising dollars in extremely low-cost ways. That could work, economically, for these local journalism entrepreneurs, and, at scale, it might work for us."

That, of course, brings back the question of the quality threshold, which you can't do without an investment and in so doing cut any profit and the reason for doing it in the first place.

But the pioneers insist that eventually someone will make it work. Somehow.

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Stories from the downturn: ex-newspaper journalists struggle to make a life online

255762 — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 10:03:00 GMT

If I had any money here is what I wouldn't do: put it into a news website, and neither will many people in the US, where former newspaper journalists are struggling to find subscribers for their post print online ventures.

My feeling is that you might as well flush it down the toilet with a smile, which is what is happening in the US as redundant journalists on former daily newspapers pour their hopes, time and some cash into start-up news ventures. These are stories from the downturn and they will not all end well.

The Rocky Mountain News shut in February and former journalists there are already on their second effort to launch an online site to fill the gap left by the paper's demise and find a life beyond the print graveyard. The paper was one of the first to go, owner EW Scripps decided to cut its loses and close for good. No half way house. No online only product. Simply the end. Done. Kaput.

That led some former RMN journalists to first launch the InDenverTimes.com. It set itself the lofty target of achieving 50,000 paying subscribers. It got about 3,000. Can there be any surprise? Paid content is the toughest of nuts to crack and local news (even stuff that is not really being covered elsewhere) is not going to cut it. Beyond a hardcore few and the civic minded, people won’t buy it. Not in numbers at least.

Up comes start-up number two. Some from the InDenverTimes.com and others who had worked on the Rocky Mountain News then launched the Rocky Mountain Independent.

The Rocky Mountain Independent plans to have fulltime staff and more than a dozen freelancers who will be trying to compete with MediaNews Group's flagship paper The Denver Post, which is tough as the Denverpost.com has a good website. The RMI hopes to get ad revenue, which will be tough, and some members in the $2 to $4 a month range/$24 a year although most content will be free.

That ad revenue is going to be hard to come by. They also have to contend with people spending less time of US newspaper websites, which will hit these news start-up sites as much as the well resourced and established newspaper websites. This makes it tough for even committed journalists like the RMI's editor Steve Foster who puts it like this: "We're people who want to stay in journalism, in Denver. There's certainly an audience for it out there. We'll see if we can make a living at it."

You have to wish them luck. Away from Colorado and up in Seattle former journalists at Hearst's defunct Seattle Post-Intelligencer have launched the Seattle Post Globe.

It has, according to PaidContent, raised $12,000 via donations, but with only $1,000 a week coming in via donations they have about three weeks left.

Still, founder Kery Murakami hasn't given up and wants to hire five full-time reporters, but even paying subsistence wages is going to cost a lot of bucks over the course of a month or a year and it still has to compete with local paper, the Seattle Times, which again has a well resourced website.

There are numerous other stories out there of similar ventures, but most are struggling. Earlier this year, former journalists at The East Valley Tribune outside Phoenix launched The Arizona Guardian, which is also looking for subscriptions.

These sites are emerging against a backdrop of free hyperlocal sites launching, which employ no or next to no journalists and draw content from the community like the non-profit journalism enterprise MinnPost.com. Or Seattlepi.com, which retained about 20 of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer's 165 editorial staff, to produce some news, blogs and columns, coupled with reader blogs, community databases and photo galleries.

The New York Times is also experimenting with The Local, which will feature posts by New York Times journalists and community members.

Similar projects are well advanced in the UK where the regional press has been the driving force. Trinity Mirror has a growing network and focus on hyperlocal sites and has launched a few. More recently Associated Newspaper revealed plans to launch 50 local news sites for communities where people can write and upload their own content and discuss local issues.

If anyone is going to succeed it will be the newsgroups, which have the scale and resource to get these projects off the ground, mixed in with some not-for-profits, but sadly many of these ventures launched by former print reporters are unlikely to make it.

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Like Water for Broadband

1319935 — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 22:46:00 GMT

Today's the big day for Digital Britain. The consultations have produced a very long wish list. I expect Ben Bradshaw will read out his in Parliament this afternoon. In a ‘simultaneous broadcast’ (how quaint) Lord Carter will be presenting the outcomes of his investigations into the state of Britain as a digital nation at the RSA. So listen in to Parliament this afternoon.

Early reports indicate that a lot of people will be disappointed. In order of moan, the music industry will be upset that the government is unlikely to ‘criminalise’ filesharers. Fans of local news will have to put up with the fact that people don’t buy local papers any more. Court reporting from the Norwich assizes will be given over to Google. The Technology industry will think the government isn’t going far enough, especially in relation to developing a ‘next generation’ infrastructure.

The BBC will think it’s got off lightly, frankly. Ofcom will become busier. My mum won’t really care. Broadband is important to her, but not actually as important as water, or electricity, or chocolate, for that matter.

My wish list? 3 million more homes online. Phone boxes should become internet points (as opposed to condom dispensers). And creating a digital economy that supports British content production in a more intelligent way than previously, which actually comes from software rather than hardware, and from people rather than pipes.

I’d like to see a British Google, Digg or Microsoft. But somehow I don’t see that coming about as a result of policy thrash.

And the outcome? There'll be ideas for government policy that will either legislate for uncompetitiveness (Korea and Japan already have far more advanced internet infrastructures) and force media companies into accepting changing state for the future. There'll be liberal protectionism for the past (especially in salvaging lTN with BBC monies). It'll certainly be a long list of wishes. But as ancient Jinn will tell you, three's probably enough.

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Digital Britain Unconference. An alternative view for Lord Carter.

1319935 — Fri, 29 May 2009 18:05:00 GMT

Anyone familiar with this brief? "We've been working on this for nearly a year, but we're not sure we've got anything good. You need to come up with a plan by next week that will save the world." Alright, it's not quite like that, but I was struck by the similarities between watching the Digital Britain Conference panel debates and the innumerable briefing meets I've been to over the years where the digital question has created an atmosphere of confusion, excitement, panic and opportunity amongst those charged with stewarding brands into the future. Everyone knows that a 'lick of digital paint' isn't quite enough. But nobody knows quite enough to make a decision. And those that do know feel they haven't been consulted.

In the case of Digital Britain, there are big unanswered questions. Defining 'digital' is problematic enough. Although the official consultation period was drawing to an end, it felt right to do something about these questions by posing them to a wider community of those who have been involved in the digital economy for rather longer than Lord Carter. From an original tweet by Bill Thompson on the backchannel at Gordon Brown's Digital Conference, 12 unconferences were held (including London, Manchester, Glasgow and Cornwall) to discuss the interim report and provide useful feedback for the Digital Britain team at BERR. Most of the communication took place on twitter (unconference was, briefly, a trending topic). The outputs of these sessions were compiled and edited into a series of reports, and then edited into a single submission given in this week, which the Digital Britain team are reading 'with interest'.

Will it make a difference? I hope so. Was it worth it? I guess so. As a whole new model of consultation it was an experience of our age, truly collaborative, intense, interested, bright people, with an interest in 'doing something important' and 'doing the right thing.' If only agencies could work this way.

The full report is available here. Other comments are available here, and here.

Digital Britain Conference the most important to be held this year says Gordon Brown.

1319935 — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 10:14:00 GMT

Fresh from the G20, so might be a bit of overclaim. Yet the ‘dodge-it-all’ bandwagon carries on apace, with #digitalbritain trending top on Twitter on Friday. Gordon gets digital, it says on the live feed twitter fail, lampooned so cruelly in the Telegraph. But the politicians aren’t saying very much really, other than now that the rest of the economy is fucked, it’s down to the digital economy to save the nation. Give or take an embarrassing email or two. Does that sound familiar to anyone in agency land?

I think there’s a problem defining the digital economy. Sly Bailey thinks it is EVIL. And is DESTROYING JOURNALISM, along with local councils whose efforts to publish Redbridge council newsletters should be BANNED. Lord Mandelson thinks it is the infrastructure and investment backbone the nation needs to prepare for the future. The Chinese government thinks it a means to take over the world. Will Hutton says the Long Tail is nonsense and we are slipping relentlessly towards a disturbing world of enormous monopolies. Lord Carter thinks it should spawn new business models. Lord knows how that’s going to happen whilst the majority of the consultative process takes place with the institutional behemoths of telecoms, media and technology.

And poor Stephen Fry – his ‘internet should be like driving’ analogy was rather shot down in flames, apposite given Mandelson’s efforts to bail out the flailing ‘British’ car industry. There is a serious debate to be had about digital skills, which lost its way on the day in the crossfire of opinion about how the education system doesn’t teach critical thinking anyway. Expecting teenagers to apply thoughtful analysis to web browsing habits is ignorant to the point of ridiculous. Note to self – distinguish between the development of creative and technical skills that school the talent that will keep the nation great from the general IT literacy and media literacy content of the national curriculum that will help the nation keep up.

Funnily enough, this digital conference diversity reflects the agency world quite well. Two schools of though are forming. Introducing, in the blue corner, the ‘old’. Without true expertise and effort to create new models of thinking, working and creating, this group will truck along into a state of blissful monopoly and lowest economic denominator of quality and nostalgia, until Google one day does swallow up WPP, Havas or indeed Trinity Mirror. And in the red corner, welcome the ‘new’ challengers who will reshape the way business is done, who seamlessly move between code and creativity in their arguments. What can we learn from the experiences of the digital agencies? There’s a decent body of people out there that really understand the digitisation of media, the democratization of content and on-demand business. Wouldn’t you rather hear from someone with ten years experience of articulating the value of user experience versus brand positioning, at the coalface of digital strategy?

Then there’s the third corner, the purply beige regulator, who looks at the ‘big picture’ of protecting the establishment whilst claiming to encourage innovation. As anyone involved in the start up scene will tell you, you don’t get much help with the latter from this government. Hats off to the founders of Bebo and Lastminute who’ve just set up an angel fund to support innovative businesses, identifying a real gap in the market for the micro-business community of new ideas. I’m an enormous fan of innovation, but short of the occasional social media start up, we aren’t seeing very much of it reported at the moment across Brand Republic. Yes, economic consolidation is a blunt instrument, bashing the experimental with the tried and tested.

Don’t take pioneer status for granted. Get involved in the Digital Britain debate. It’s more important than you think. For a start, you can follow the #unconference we’re putting together by searching #dbuc or @dbuc [ok, so you need to be on twitter for that]. Alternatively, contribute to the Fake Digital Britain report here, and test your digital literacy skills to the full. Beats writing to your MP.

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This is not a newspaper website

255762 — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 09:02:00 GMT

A sad day for newspapers as Hearst closes the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and takes it online, but what it plans online, with efforts to create a community title, could be the model for the future.

I blogged last week about the woes of the top 25 US newspapers and how the future is shaping up to become local or hyperlocal with the New York Times joining established community sites.

Now as Hearst today prints the last copy of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that vision takes on a new impetus.

In its press release, Hearst is quite explicit in its goal of not attempting to transfer a newspaper online, but rather crafting the remnants of it into a new type of digital business serving smaller groups and people and advertisers (a new digital sales team of 20 has been taken on for this task). Possibly even a role for niche paid for content.

The way the New York Times put it was that the Seattlepi.com will more resemble a local Huffington Post more than a traditional newspaper - as the political blog is another that expands locally.

Part of this crafting is about economics pure and simple. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer had 165 editorial staff and the Seattlepi.com will have 20. This will be a mixture of traditional reporters, bloggers and columnists, but those staff writers will be far outnumbered by as many as 150 reader blogs, community data bases and photo galleries.

Those reader blogs will be further supplemented by the blogs and forums that already exist in the community and Hearst made the point that it will be "linking to the great work of other websites and blogs in the community".

The same is true of the New York Times experiment, its community blogs launch into neighbourhoods already well covered by existing blogs.

The community based future of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is likely to be repeated across America and elsewhere in the coming 18 months as more newspapers go under.

Jeff Jarvis writing in the Guardian yesterday called hyperlocal "the elusive golden fleece" and said it represented a new collaborative, as opposed to competitive, era for local newspapers.

In the case of Seattlepi.com and the experiments of The New York Times, the hope is that by providing the platform readers and community groups will provide much of the content and the impetus to take such hyperlocal projects forward.

This is the end of an era, but what beckons could be a vibrant age of digital community websites, which are different from the newspapers that came before them in how they are produced and how they are consumed.

There are other really interesting experiments taking place that provide pointers to how this community future might look. Nonprofit journalism enterprise MinnPost.com, which describes itself as part of the "new economic model for high-quality local journalism", has launched a drive for microsponsors for one of its most popular sites the BrauBlog. Almost 130 people have donated a total of $2,575, which will be doubled by a matching gift from The Harnisch Foundation.

With so many regional newspapers and jobs going in the UK it s a model that has merit on this side of the Atlantic as well. Almost 60 UK newspapers closed during 2008 and almost 400 jobs have been cut in the last two weeks with 1000 in total gone since last summer.

This led Sly Bailey, chief executive of Trinity Mirror, to today call on the government to relax merger restrictions on regional media groups and allow them to consolidate to obtain sufficient scale, but it might take something more radical than that.

Other recent posts of the US newspaper crises

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AOP 08: Sly Bailey

2371004 — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 10:33:00 GMT

09:45 a.m. – Sly Bailey reiterates the theme of this year’s summit: Content, convergence, and creativity. Embracing and acting on these three fundamental ideas will ensure, (at least) a chance of survival in a world where traditional media copes with a transition into the digital realm without a tested monetization structure.

Bailey said: “As media continues to fragment, our businesses will only thrive by putting ‘digital’ at its core.”

She continues that despite the doomsayers, and the lack of cheerleaders, print media will survive the economic crisis and beyond. She said “Some of you are suggesting that the days of the newspaper are ending. It is plain to see that digital media is revolutionizing the industry, but it does not mean the end of newspapers as we know them.

“I’ll say this to those writing the obituary for print media: newspapers are iconic media brands, they will still be here when the cycle turns. They are showing that brands can stretch and reach for new relationships with customers, driving new growth, but there is no doubt the growth will get harder.”

The economic downturn is now affecting digital media, growth fell in 2008 and it will be far more challenging in 2009, “even Google is not immune”. However, Bailey felt that this current crisis could be good for the industry, as a model where only the strong will survive.

There will be casualties in the coming months, she warned, but the strongest brands will survive and prosper to thrive in the world of digital media. Those that fall never had a grasp of their new environment to begin with.

Print media will survive, but what won’t will be the traditional process of newspaper publication: the five step regimen from journalist, to editor, to sub, to designer, to print.

Bailey cited changes at a number of her Trinity Mirror titles where the entire process as been uprooted and turned on its head. She suggested a centralized newsroom, with multi-platform medium, print, video, text, photographs, online, where journalists work across all titles, not just in their specialized beats.

The simplified work flow eliminates two of the steps, which means lower costs at no detriment to the editorial quality.

More importantly, the traditional relationship between the journalist and the reader is effectively dead. Journalist’s are no longer able to hash out content for a hapless audience, it’s all about interaction no.

Social networking in particular has had a role to play in triggering the changing relationship, now that the audience can interact with the journalist, they expect a different level of content, beyond the boundaries of hard news.

Lastly, (the last C) digital media will produce a larger broader canvas for creativity.

“We need to be in a perpetual state of innovation, always trying new things, whether they work or not.”

She continued: “We can keep looking back into the rear view mirror, judging today with how things use to be. Or we can look forward and be prepared to replace the obsolete process. The new digital media world is crammed with opportunities and those competent enough to grasp them will survive. Fair competition is healthy and breeds innovation.”

AOP 08: Nick Higham

2371004 — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 09:55:00 GMT

09:40 a.m. - Nick HIgham takes the stage to give his opening remarks and introduce the first speaker, Sly Bailey CEO of Trinity Mirror.

Higham laments that traditional media is “living in interesting times” due to the economic downturn, but for the time being online advertising seems to be weathering the storm, although a slowdown is inevitable.

Higham said: “The digital world has seen 10 years of extraordinary growth, and now we are near the natural top of the “S” curve where there will be somewhat of a downturn. However, we ar at a difficult moment of transition from an offline world to one of multiple platforms, where the digital world will grow dramatically once more.”

Higham introduces Bailey by listing figures of declining advertising revenues and circulation numbers for some of her Trinity Mirror publications, before offering some sympathetic “good news” that Trinity Mirror is one of the large firms making honest investments into digital media

Impact on Press to Online Migration of a Downturn

1736064 — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 12:36:00 GMT

Not a snappy heading is it? but here are a couple of slides that show the impact on the most mature online recruitment market (I.T.) - and maybe there are some lessons to be learnt for general market innext few years. The commentary is that as IT sites like Jobserve, Jobsite grew in late 90s - the press market grew simultaneously riding the IT boom.

Cue 2000-2001 post dot com crash, post Y2K, post establishment of Euro and 9/11. We saw slowing in growth in online and a complete car crash in press advertising. And when the market picked up again.... advertisers had looked at ROI, cost per response, were leaner with their ad budgets and we saw "hockey stick" growth in online and nothing at all in press. This will not be of great cheer to executives like Trinity Mirror's Sly Bailey who claimed recently that downturn was cyclical - by the way how in 2008 can a CEO of a big publicly listed media company say that and not be laughed off stage by city analysts.