Success of the Web? Try Newspaper Values With a New Twist

Caroline Little, Adviser to Guardian News & Media and former CEO and Publisher of Washington Post/Newsweek Interactives, United States

Despite impressive gains in audience and advertisers, newspaper web sites do not produce revenue comparable to that of print newspapers. Transferring the core values of newspapers to the new ways of the web is the way to change that, says Caroline Little, who advises both the Washington Post and The Guardian on their internet strategies.

Ms Little, the former chief executive officer and publisher of Washington Post/Newsweek Interactive and a special advisor for Guardian News & Media’s expansion in the United States, said there was no ready-made solution for revenue growth. But she believes “a relatively simple core philosophy” will succeed.

“Keep one foot rooted in the core journalism values of the core product, and one that happens to be delivering the most revenue, and with the other, stretch as far as possible to try new things in this new medium,” she said in her keynote address to the conference, organised by the World Association of Newspapers.

“The news websites share the same journalistic values as the newspapers, but the web folks also are working in a medium that’s indisputably different, one that requires trying new things and sometimes going down in flames,” she said. “Fear of failure can be debilitating. All we have to lose by being too conservative is everything.”

Ms Little cited four areas for successul digital growth:

  Multimedia storytelling. “For a newspaper, storytelling options have long been limited to text, photography and graphics. The rise of the Web has added a number of new tools to this equation: video, audio, photo galleries, panoramic photos, blogs, etc,” Ms Little said. “Now, we can approach a story with a different mindset, one that says, “What’s the best way to tell this story?

  Database journalism. “One often hears about the web’s ‘endless news hole.’ The endless news hole, of course, is largely a myth. You can only publish as much good journalism as you can produce, and that takes skilled reporters and editors. And most papers have fewer reporters and editors than it did a few years ago. But what that endless storage space is perfect for is databases that can useful to your readers. Washingtonpost.com has been very active in this area. For example, congressional voting database going back to 1991 and a searchable list of U.S. war dead in Iraq and Afghanistan.’”

  Reader engagement. “Here are a few things you need to know about your readers: some of them act like jerks, many of them won’t like the journalism you produce, and the angrier ones tend to be more active. But the upside is huge. When given a chance to participate in the conversation, readers come back. A lot.”

  Distribution. “In this new world of media fragmentation, media companies cannot control the format in which readers consume our journalism. That’s scary, but also a huge opportunity. We now have the chance to get our journalism in front of readers while they’re driving via audio podcast or radio, while they’re watching their televisions via set-top boxes or video podcasts, or while they’re standing on a street corner looking for a restaurant via cell phone or iPod. And we can push our journalism to them via RSS, e-mail newsletters and widgets. We can no longer apply the “Field of Dreams” mantra - build and it they will come - to our web sites. We need to be putting our content where the people are, on sites like Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, etc.”

Be Flexible For the Fast-Changing Digital World

José Antonio Ferris, Head of Strategy, Prisacom, Spain

When defining your strategy for digital platforms, it is important to remember that it may change tomorrow.

“Our business model today is this one,” says Mr Ferris, pointing to a revenue model spread across advertising, e-business and mobile offerings. “I say today, because it changes quite rapidly and we try to be flexible to stay up with changes in the world.”

Prisacom is the digital arm of the Prisa Group, whose flagship is the national daily El Pais. To illustrate how strategy changes, Mr Ferris pointed to the El Pais website, which was subscription based from 2002 to 2005 and has been opened since then.

“While we were closed, other people took advantage of it. Many users of El Pais said, OK, that’s closed, I’ll go to another website. Looking back, one could say that was a mistake.”

Concerning today’s strategy, here are a few of Mr Ferris’ points concerning on-line and mobile revenues:

  Our brands and contents are trusted and worthy. We should strengthen them to maximize our potential on display advertising.

  Innovation in advertising formats, especially multimedia, is crucial.

  Web 2.0, user generated content and the user/customer as a central figure should be enhanced.

Making Users Central to Your Editorial Offering

Matthew Buckland, General Manager, Publishing and Social Media, Media 24.com, South Africa

“I don’t think that publishers have gone far enough to include users in the editorial and publishing processes,” says Mr Buckland. “We allow them to comment below articles. We allow them to blog. But I don’t think that we’ve got the model completely right.”

Mr Buckland, whose company is part of the Naspers Group, the biggest publisher in Africa, introduced the concept of the “blog hybrid” being used at the Media & Guardian newspaper website in South Africa.

The concept brings the blog and media worlds together into a “very powerful publishing product” that is a closed network of users. The Thought Leader is platform on which journalists, academics, columnists, CEOs and other “expert readers” from the community are invited to write opinion pieces.

“We have hundreds of contributors who work at their own pace and schedules,” says Mr Buckland. “They must write about issues and not daily diaries. We don’t pay - they write for passion, peer recognition, influence, profile and to make business.”

Mr Buckland said a key element of the platform is that, unlike most blogs, all content is professionally vetted.. “Media should relish being control freaks about their content,” he said, “That’s what they do - present quality content.”

Digital Press Trends

Martha Stone, Director, WAN Shaping the Future of the Newspaper project

Ms Stone presented an overview of digital publishing, usership and revenue trends drawn from research, study tours and publications from the Shaping the Future of the Newspaper project of the World Association of Newspapers.

She focused on four major trends: Online and mobile advertising growth; video; citizen journalism; and driving traffic/search engine optimisation.

Some of the highlights:

  More videos are viewed on news websites than any other platform except YouTube, offering publishers an opportunity to monetize them with pre-roll advertisements. “Online video represents, according to many studies we’ve looked at, a big potential for us,” says Ms Stone. “I believe we’re on the cusp of leveraging the value of video.”

  New pricing models are emerging, including a “cost per day” model that has been bringing big revenue for major national dailies in several countries - 30,000 euros for Aftonbladet in Sweden, 35,000 euros for VG in Norway, 25,000 dollars for the Wall Street Journal, 30,000 dollars for the New York Times.

  Mobile advertising will become a “real business” in the near future. “I believe we are (with mobile) where we were in the year 2000 with online,” says Ms Stone. “Not many of us were making money. But the potential is great, just like it was for the internet.”

More on the SFN project at www.futureofthenewspaper.com.