Editors' Blog | Journalism.co.uk » outlook2010

#Outlook2010: Lauren Rich Fine on media’s future – ‘Is there too much news?’

Laura Oliver — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 15:23:04 +0000

Last week Journalism.co.uk attended the INMA and Online Publishers Association (OPA) Europe’s annual conference Outlook 2010 – the event focused on innovation, transformation and making money for media businesses. Follow our coverage at this link.

Former ContentNext research director and media analyst Lauren Rich Fine opened her conference presentation with a potentially ‘heretical’ question: “Is it possible that there’s too much news?”

Fine’s overview of the state of the media industry (focusing on the US market) and her ideas for a more collaborative, cooperative future can be listened to in full below:

Here are some key quotes:

On content:

“I would suggest to you that there might be too much content, that we need to see rampant consolidation, that it’s not just going to be in the newspaper industry (…) it has to be everywhere.”

On the newspaper industry:

“The newspaper industry has been very bad at being optimistic about its future, the newspaper industry has been really bad at marketing itself (and TV and radio are even more off-base).”

On advertising:

“Classified advertising is permanently exiting newspapers – and it should, it works better online.”
“If classified advertising continues to fall by the wayside this could be an industry operating with no margin.”

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#Outlook2010: Germany’s WAZ media – learning from bigger players and going open source

Laura Oliver — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 15:16:08 +0000

Regional newspaper WAZ Media has learned to punch above its weight online by looking at what bigger publishers are doing digitally and seeking out free and open source software and platforms to use, explains the outgoing CEO of its new media Katharina Borchert.

Starting with video the group supplied reporters with Flip cameras to capture original video news and began using a bank of freelancers to edit the footage.

The group has also joined forces with another regional publisher to create The Media Lab – a small company that invests at a really early stage in local online start-ups that add something interesting to the market, explains Borchert.

This has already spawned an online-to-print publishing solution for printed user-generated papers in areas not covered by WAZ’s titles – after a year-and-a-half the group expects this project to be in profit by next year.

Listen to Borchert’s talk on video, Twitter and regional media innovation online below:

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#Outlook2010: LePost.fr – horizontal, not vertical, news

Laura Oliver — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 15:14:34 +0000

Two years since its launch user-generated site LePost.fr – launched by Le Monde – attracts 2.5 million unique users a month (not a lot less than Le Monde’s online efforts at 3.5 million).

A team of six specialised journalists, two editors, one videojournalist and one investigative journalist are responsible for producing around 10 per cent of the site’s content – the rest is down to the users, who produce around 500 posts a day. It’s an integration of professional and amateur news – with teams of amateurs ‘coached’ by professionals, says the team.

More from LePost on how the site operates in the audio below:

“Our idea was to put a newsroom at the most dynamic part of the web (…) social media,” the site’s editor-in-chief, Benoit Raphael, says.

“We believe that people are no longer satisfied with vertical news. Traditional journalists choose and produce stories and deliver them to readers. In a networked media like LePost we let people co-choose and co-produce stories.”

Raphael says LePost produces ‘horizontal news’ – news to be shared, commented upon and added to.

Related reading: LePost.fr: How amateurs produce valuable journalismSimilar Posts:

#Outlook2010: There’s a business opportunity in e-readers, says NYTimes circulation VP

Laura Oliver — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:59:04 +0000

“There’s a real opportunity for paid electronic products,” Yasmin Namini, senior vice president of circulation at the New York Times, told delegates last week.

Namini was specifically referring to the NYTimes’ experience in this area – the paper created a unique ‘bundled’ offering with Amazon’s Kindle. The NYTimes Kindle offer at $499-a-year was the latest version of the e-reader (the DX), in a NYTimes branded leather wallet and came with a year’s subscription to the paper’s Kindle edition.

Sounds like a hefty price tag – but to buy a Kindle DX is $489 and it’s £168 for a one-year NYTimes subscription on the device.

“We wanted to test our capabilities to sell a device and a subscription as a bundle,” explains Namini.

The deal was launched as a test at the end of September and nearly every available NYTimes-Kindle has been sold. Furthermore the offer was only marketed (via an e-mail campaign) to expired subscribers to the print edition and potential readers outside of print home-delivery routes. The first sale was made within 10 minutes of the e-mails being sent out, adds Namini.

Similar trials have also been run by the Washington Post and the Boston Globe, according to a release from Amazon.

Some caveats from Namini to publishers looking to launch similar packages – publishers should:

Maintain the billing relationship with the customer
Determine the pricepoint for customer
Have access to customer data

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#Outlook2010: Don’t forget your print subscribers, says Associated Newspapers

Laura Oliver — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:44:30 +0000

As the news media searches for viable business models for online and new revenue streams in the form of pay walls, members clubs and micropayments, the humble print newspaper subscriber may have been overlooked.

Such was the argument of Associated Newspapers’ circulation director Neil Jagger who explained to delegates how his group targeted home delivery (‘not the sexiest beast in the world’) as a revenue source.

At the start of this drive, there were around 2 million home delivery customers for UK newspapers – with the Daily Mail accounting for around 500,000 of those, explained Jagger.

Using a retail sales force of 30, Associated built up a 1.3 million-strong database of addresses of newspaper subscribers not signed up with the Daily Mail by approaching retailers directly for the information.

These 1.3 million were sent a direct mail offering a range of subscription packages and vouchers if they signed up. The result was a 2 per cent take up (27,000 agreed to have the paper home delivered).

Not satisfied with this the team moved onto telesales offering the same package as the direct mail, which had a 7 per cent conversion rate (59,000 signed up).

Finally, Associated is using 200 canvassers selling home delivery subscriptions door-to-door and has so far generated 70,000 sign for an initial three-month period.

Following this push the Daily Mail has gained 156,000 new customers, says Jagger – an opportunity created by building this database of non-subscribers, using available information in a way that other publishers had not done previously.

Not all of the new recipients have stayed with the paper, admits Jagger, but, from the 156,000, 81 per cent are staying for 6 months after initially agreeing; while 64 per cent are staying 18 months or more.

“Once we’ve got these customers we’ve got to keep them,” explains Jagger and customers are sent loyalty packs, alternative subscription offers or money-off vouchers.

“We just don’t want to lose those customers.”Similar Posts:

#Outlook2010: A flipbook design for newspapers?

Laura Oliver — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:37:39 +0000

Focusing on the future of print media doesn’t necessarily mean abandoning your print product, but instead looking at what it does best and ways it can be improved – the views of several speakers at last week’s event.

But this doesn’t mean print is sacred – innovation for survival can also mean a drastic rethink of what we expect from a newspaper, even in terms of how its read.

Enter: Peter Bluijs, former newspaperman with Holland’s De Telegraaf, who is looking at the idea of the vertical newspaper:

(Video filmed by Marcin Nowak and Artur Karda from Media Regionalne, Poland)Similar Posts:

Tweets from #Outlook2010: innovation for the newspaper industry

Laura Oliver — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 10:20:27 +0000

Journalism.co.uk is moderating this week’s Outlook-2010 conference – a joint venture from INMA Europe and the Online Publishers Association (OPA) Europe.

The conference sessions will try to address three key issues: innovation, transformation and making money, and an international line-up.

Courtesy of the event’s blogger Marek Miller there are a series of interviews with speakers from the event at this link.

We’ll be featuring some coverage from the conference (after our duties come to an end), but some tweets from the event are streamed below:

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