Search results matching tag 'newspapers'

Sunday Paper Pick ‘n’ Mix

980070 — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:06:00 GMT

I spend around 15 minutes every month down at the recycling bins in Sainsbury’s car park in Richmond.

It’s be a lot less frequent if I wasn’t throwing away a load of the Sunday Times I don’t read.

Regular news – forget it – rather get it from the BBC
Sport – too much footy and again rather hear what Aggers has to say
Appointments – quite happy where I am thanks
Culture – although I need some I have a TV to tell me what’s on next

What I do read?

Style – because gawd knows I need it and I like AA Gill’s restaurant reviews
Home – because I always want a bigger one and like to snoop
Magazine – the features are often very good
Travel – I like to get away from it all on the train
Gadget – because I love to see how negative the journos can be about MS products

So does that say something about me?

If I only went for the last 5 would that give advertisers something better to aim at?

It would save some trees, energy, and do much for the paper delivery man’s heart condition as I live on the 3rd floor with no lift.

Someone tell me why I can’t?

Quick and dirty research still needs a brain

1840893 — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 08:52:00 GMT

In this climate, businesses rightly hesitate to commit a lot of money to market research. It’s a sunk cost - you have no idea if it’s going to bring you a return until after you’ve spent the money. Instead, many are taking the option of doing quick and dirty research - getting what they hope is most of the answer for a fraction of the cost.

The downside of corner-cutting in research is that you also raise the risk of actually losing revenue for your business - it cuts both ways. The greatest risk is when savings are made more on the thinking side, than the doing side of research.

A recent survey concluded that only a tiny minority of people will pay for online news from a newspaper publisher. The fieldwork may have been robust, but the conclusions are less so. The question itself exposed a fundamental lack of understanding about what people get from newspapers. Which is things to talk about, things to laugh at, things to think about. Suddenly these seem much more valuable to a research respondent than dull old “news”. Research is only as good as the questions you ask, no matter how many good people answer.

OK, so business decision makers are clever enough to take a piece of PR research with a pinch of salt, and no publisher is going to make an online pricing decision on a single piece of evidence.

But this is when cutting out the thinking time starts to undermine the whole brand of research. If people start to think that cheap is too risky, and expensive is unaffordable, where does that leave the entire industry?

Murdoch forces Sorrell to make U-turn over paid-content

1641923 — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 10:56:00 GMT

Martin Sorrell, chief executive of WPP and one of adland's best known soothsayers, has dramatically revised his stance on the viability of publishers charging for content online following comments from the quintessential newspaper man, Rupert Murdoch.

Speaking at an industry event in Greece last week, The Daily Telegraph reports an irrepressible Sorrell, as saying: "[Rupert] Murdoch is absolutely correct to try and get people paying for content - it is critical for traditional media businesses as there is not enough advertising to support these models anymore.

"Getting consumers to pay for content they value is key. We have to find those areas."

Such sentiments will be music to the ears of those operating in the embattled newspaper sector, which according to Sorrell's own media investment arm GroupM is expected to see advertising revenue plummet 26% in the UK this year.

But such apparent support for online pay-walls flies in the face of Sorrell's own vision of the future, announced less than 10 months earlier.

Addressing an international advertising event in January, there could be no mistaking what the WPP leader thought about the position traditional publishers now find themselves in, or his reservations about charging for web content.

"Some of the structural changes we're seeing taking place in the [newspaper] industry, particularly in America, the failure and bankruptcy and reorganisation of these [publishing] companies is going to continue. And there's no way of stopping it, because we've given it away for free," he said.

"The seeds of this problem were sown when the people who created the new media industry, probably in the early nineties, decided - rightly from the consumers point of view I have to say - to give it away for nothing.

"It's impossible actually now to take it up. You can start up here [high] and take your pricing down, but you can't start there [free] and start moving it up."

It appears News Corp's venerable leader's commitment to "charge for all our news websites", buoyed by thriving online subs at the Wall Street Journal, has led Sorrell to change his mind.

It marks the latest backtrack in what has been a tricky year for WPP's famous crystal ball-gazer, who, lest we forget, is responsible for group billings of more than $80 billion, or around a third of all the world's measured media buying.

At the same event in January, Sorrell predicted "a flat year" for the global ad market in 2009, adding reassuringly: "We're not looking at the Armageddon or the Apocalypse Now that analysts and media followers are forecasting.

"We don't see it as bad as Goldman and others who talk about -5, I see -10 from [some quarters] which seems somewhat strange."

Nine long months, a series of forecast revisions, and thousands of redundancies later, and Sorrell now accepts a drop of 5.5% is the most likely outcome.

But then it's been one of those years; also at the IAA event in January, media execs were expressing incredulity at the suggestion a former Russian spy was being bandied around as a potential buyer for London's Evening Standard.

It's the Sun wot jumped on the bandwagon

1641923 — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 15:22:00 GMT

And so it comes to pass, News International's most popular daily newspaper The Sun has declared its allegiance to David Cameron's Tories.

The Sun tells its readers in no uncertain terms today to vote Conservative at the next election, effectively ending 12 years and 7 months of "support", for the Labour Party.

"Labour's Lost It" screams the front page, followed by a detailed blow-by-blow account about how Labour's tenure has been punctuated by "under-achievement, rank failure and a vast expansion of wasteful government interference in everyone's lives".

Of course the announcement was perfectly orchestrated, coming as it does just in time to pop any feel-good bubble generated by Gordon Brown's rabble rousing speech at the Labour Party conference in Brighton last night. But don't worry Gordie, you'll always be a hero to your wife at least.

Regardless, despite all its bluster, in today's multimedia 2.0 age, the Current Bun switching sides is not the game-changer it once was. A barometer of public opinion, perhaps - but nothing more.

In the past, Sun editors have been wined and dined by politicians on both sides of the fence and famously claims to have won the election for the Conversatives in 1992. Yet this week we're told News Int's chief executive Rebekah Brooks couldn't event get 10 mins with the PM to end their relationship in person.

The only real surprise is that it has taken so long for Rupert Murdoch's red-top to turn blue.

As with all messy break-ups, the writing's been on the wall for some time. Now for the next six months we can sit back and enjoy the spectacle, as both sides try and convince us of their relevance.

September's here, it's time to quit

1641923 — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 16:07:00 GMT

‘The summer’s over, I’ve had time to think about it, I want to quit,’ appears to be the mantra being followed by many high-profile media execs this month.

Recession or not, September has lived up to its billing as the month which gets headhunters hearts racing.

Today’s news that Andy Brent, group brand marketing director at BSkyB, has parted company with the pay-TV broadcaster just one year into the job, has taken many by surprise.

His departure, confirmed in an email by Jeremy Darroch, BSkyB's chief executive, leaves a gapping hole in the management of the media and broadcasting group’s £100m plus marketing operations.

You can bet on Brent resurfacing somewhere soon.

But as unexpected as his exit is, it's far from unusual this month. Also on the move is News International’s chief marketing officer Jeremy Schwartz, who walked out less than nine months into the top marketing role.

Let's remember it took News Int almost six months to find Schwartz for its first overarching CMO role for The Times, The Sunday Times, The Sun, and News of The World, so it seems safe to assume News Int's newly promoted chief executive Rebekah Brooks nee Wade was less than convinced.

The newspaper publisher is now expected to move back to its tried and tested model of having individual marketing directors responsible for each title.

Elsewhere, advertising veteran’s Daryl Fielding’s brief foray into newspapers ended abruptly on Monday, and Simon Davies is already primed to take over the role of commercial director of The Independent and The Independent on Sunday.

Despite best intentions, sometimes, things just don't work out - ask outgoing PPA chief executive Jonathan Shephard, who has attracted widespread criticism for his 18 month spell at the association for consumer and B2B magazines.

His decision to cull the association's events and marketing activities during what is arguably the most challenging time the magazine industry has ever faced, didn't go down too well with many publishing members.

And Shephard's own unique style of management and communication didn't appear to help his cause, with many vocally against him from the outset.

And we haven't even mentioned C4's Andy Duncan, News Int's Mike Anderson, Mindshare's Nick Waters or SMG's Jim Marshall.

All of which make for a heated return from the summer, and you get the sense it's just the beginning.

A mixture of celebrity coverage and hard news leads to UK papers upping their US site traffic

2545541 — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 19:53:00 GMT

The other day the always informative journalism blogger Malcolm Coles showed how UK newspapers were doing a bit of SEO by stuffing their web-pages full of Patrick Swayze results and tags. This follows Malcom's earlier analysis that the Daily Mail had become the UK's most popular online newspaper....thanks to its coverage of Michael Jackson's death (on another note, check out how the Mail is copying right wing blogs in the US with its Obama coverage).

So it seems UK papers are having some success in bringing US traffic to their sites.

This was demonstrated by Comscore earlier in the year when it showed that most UK newspapers get 50%+ of their visitors abroad and now Robin Goad of metrics firm Hitwise has weighed in on the same theme.

Robin's stats show that a number of UK sites rank highly in the top 200 list of media sites in the US. This includes BBC News (no 21), The Daily Mail (no 47), The Daily Telegraph (no 74) The FT (115), The Times (131) and The Guardian (134) - I'm surprised the latter isn't higher given its attempts to lure like minded latte drinking liberals in the US.

There's been a more modest growth in Australian visitors to UK sites, but then organisations like the BBC already started with a high base being the 13th most popular news site in Australia.

It's the demographics that should spark the most interest with US brands. Wealthy Americans (household income $150k+) were the most likely to visit UK news sites, and those visitors are most likely to be based in California and New York

Perhaps more curiously, the least wealthy Americans (under $30k) were the second most likely to visit and Robin wonders whether this is due to immigrants and students.

Similarly, Experian's stats show that "aspiring contemporaries" and "affluent suburbia" over-index in terms of US visitors to UK news sites.

Useful stuff for US marketers looking to target wealthier consumers. Though for those of us working over here...now we do all tell our clients that a large chunk of those X million visitors who saw our campaigns are not from these shores...don't we?

Image, Robin Goad Hitwise

The End of the Embargo?

2438628 — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 14:54:00 GMT

Interesting piece in the current issue of PR Week about concerns we could be seeing the ‘Slow death of the embargo’. The Wall Street Journal is believed to have introduced a new policy stipulating that they will only honour embargos on exclusive stories. It’s a change of direction that’s obviously brought on by the pressure to be first with breaking news amid increasing competition from other online media outlets especially bloggers who traditionally have been more cavalier with embargos.

Certain newspapers may feel that they can’t afford the niceties of sitting on embargoed stories when specialist blogs are prepared to ‘publish and be dammed’. News has moved on it’s no longer written up today printed tonight and read in papers tomorrow, it’s available instantly & constantly via multiple formats.

The walls have come down and the means of news production are now available to anyone. In that light embargos can seem antiquated, but they still have a place, they just need to be used with care and not as a ‘catch all’ control mechanism.

PR Week editor Danny Rogers talks about embargoes as being “a lazy means of dealing with the media.” The WSJ and the blogs have stirred things up & if that stops these ‘lazy’ embargoes it’s probably no bad thing.

So what could this it mean for photos? I always feel the best way to handle a press PR photo is to use embargoes as sparingly as possible. Basically, ‘take it, get it out, get it in!’ Getting your pictures in the press is always hard enough without making it harder for yourself by putting embargoes across the top of them unless they’re really necessary.

Obviously certain photos because of logistics or availability need to be be taken beforehand and held back. Journalists will understand that and personal relationships, trust and exclusives will always play a role in this business. But maybe the shake up in attitudes towards embargoes generally will make people look at picture embargoes a bit harder too. Using embargoes where they aren’t really appropriate, such as on pictures taken in public places or of stunts that are open knowledge may start to become a thing of the past.

In this climate when the media is crying out for good, free to use PR copy, it’s unnecessary to shackle every story & picture with an embargo. Nobody can really control the media, instead we just need to continue to work with it making content that the press will want to use now, not next week.

3am and everyones asleep

1713999 — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 10:24:00 GMT

On from the launch of the relatively impressive if not entirely unique Mirror Football website earlier this month, recently launched is the digital version of the “famous” 3am Girls- Trinity Mirror’s latest attempt at a vertical for which they possibly hope to charge in the foreseeable future in order to help stave off the UK’s largest newspaper publisher’s plummeting share price avoid laying off more journalists and closing down more newspapers. http://www.3am.co.uk/ What can we say about the SEO of this site by looking at it for 2 minutes? The URL structure looks ok, they seem to have a hierarchical system that uses hyphen to separate words. But I can’t say the actual words they want Google to spider are too impressive. I am not sure what they will make of “Ooh”, “Gasp!” and “Phwaor!” as the links on the main navigation. All the page titles are the same as well and there is no RSS feed, but I don’t want to be too picky. Does it have any meta data then? What are those CTRs going to be like? Let’s Google [3am] … here they are down at number 6. Well, I don’t know about you but to me the snippet’s not exactly an incentive to learn more. But we all know newspaper companies hate Google so maybe they’re not interested in traffic from search engines, which might start 80% of internet journeys but let’s not let facts get in the way of the truth. Oh but hold on. Trinity are paying for PPC rankings for both [3am] and [celebrity gossip] so they are at least acknowledging that search exists in some form. Oh dear. To be fair, it is early days for this site. With a decent amount of marketing more people will come and visit what is an established brand in the celebrity world and as a result the site will attract some high quality links that will push it up the rankings to a point, despite Trinity making it as hard as possible for Google to understand what the site is about. But if they want to rank for [celebrity] (450,000 exact match searches on average per month) or [celebrity gossip] (368,000 exact match searches on average per month), which I am pretty sure they do as they are bidding on PPC for both, and compete with Heat, Perez Hilton, Spike and *whisper it* The Sun then they had better smarten up their act. Because currently they are, sensibly, not charging for content so all cash will come from ad revenue which is reliant on traffic and impressions and as far as Google, the biggest traffic driver of them all, is concerned they are merely a blip on the horizon.

Saving Newspapers - The Musical

2371004 — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 09:41:00 GMT

It's an oldie, by today's standards, but still a goodie. In April, the East Bay Express - a freesheet out of Oakland, California released 'Saving Newspapers - The Musical', an underappreciated YouTube gem.

Handing out such pearls of wisdom as 'invest in internet porn' and, simply, 'boobs', the video is surprisingly poignant, and I'm hoping the editors at The Observer take notice - dumb it down, and throw in some off-the-cuff nudity - ipso facto, newspaper saved.

Yet, I'm happy to report that the East Bay Express is still up and running, despite not taking their own advice.

The Musical was accompanied with a humorous and on-point editorial, written by Stephen Buel, East Bay Express' editor, giving further examples of how newspapers can make money in this day and age, including:

- Partnering with medicinal marijuana retailers to create branded 'buds'

- A paid circulation model, which charges Republicans to have the East Bay Express NOT deliver the newspaper to their front stoop

- Renting out the freestanding newsracks as homeless storage lockers

- User-generated copyediting, and a Wikipedia fact-checking partnership

Well, for the time being, I don't live anywhere near Oakland, but if I did, I would probably be a regular East Bay Express reader, talented reporters who don't take themselves too seriously, it's the best of both worlds and the only way ahead, I'm afraid. The era of serious journalism is dead, well not dead, but I'm just going to read it online for free, long live the Onion.

It's just a damn shame that these are the kinds of publications shutting down every other week, but none the matter, sit back and enjoy the video, and imagine your newsroom being this much fun.

It is as if the whole of Birmingham suddenly stopped reading newspapers

2545541 — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 13:38:00 GMT

Paidcontent summarises the latest ABC newspaper circulation figures from the UK (US and Australian comparisons follow below) in a single paragraph. All you need to know, says Paidcontent's Patrick Smith, is that 465,895 less national newspaper copies were being sold - and given away - in July 2009 compared to July 2008.

If we work on the principle of 2-3 readers per paper that would mean at least a million people - the equivalent to the population of Birmignham - have stopped reading a national newspaper over the past year. If you added in regionals, the figure would almost certainly be much higher with Enders Analysis telling the House of Commons culture, media and sports committee that 50% of regional papers are at risk of closure in the next five years.

In the US, the equivalent of Wisconsin has stopped reading papers

The last US figures I could find were the ABC ones that came out at the end of April (I believe new ones are out soon). Daily average circulation for 395 US newspapers dropped from 37.1 million in March 2008 to 34.4 million this year, so a total loss of 2.7 million sales. Again, if we apply the parallel above, that means 5.5+ million plus US readers have deserted the industry - call it the equivalent of a medium sized (in population) US State like Wisconsin.

Better news from Australia

The latest ABC figures from Australia imply that the country is bucking the trend. Sales of all daily newspapers in Australia stand at 20.9 million, down only 0.7%. However, national newspapers fared worse showing a drop of 3.4% on weekdays.Commenting in The Australian, Steve Allen of Fusion Strategy said that "the trend line for newspapers in Australia (is) really probably the best in the world."

Is the news getting less bad?

At the same time, it's worth paying attention to some media commentators who are predicting that the slump in the newspaper market may be bottoming out - at least in the US. Borrell Associates predicts a rebound in newspaper advertising next year, however to put that into context, even in 2014 predicted newspaper advertising ($30 billion) will still be far below the $55 billion the industry managed earlier this decade.

Like a number of other pundits in this space, Borrell Associates doesn't feel that newspapers are dead, just that their future is to be leaner and "more interesting, more relative to their audiences" - a view I share.

So the overall trend is still very much in one direction as newspapers battle for a future in a digital world, but it is a process of evolution rather than a today / tomorrow thing. After all, 88% of newspaper reading time is still in print and not online.

Image - Birmingham, UK, by Paul Tomlins