Writing on the Guardian’s Inside blog today, national editor Dan Roberts says any advantage ceded to competitors, including the Independent’s Archie Bland, has been outweighed by a growing number of ideas and tips submitted by readers. Initial interest from other journalists has also reportedly given way to interest from the Guardian’s audience.
We had a surprising amount of interest from around the world, including this in Le Monde, and I gave interviews to a Canadian radio station and US technology website Mashable. But gradually, the interest from readers began to eclipse the interest from other journalists and a subtle shift began to take place in our newsroom priorities.
News International has responded to reports that it has decided not to introduce a paywall at the Sun, as it has for the Times, Sunday Times, and did for the now-defunct News of the World site, denying that a decision has been made over charges.
A report today by paidContent suggests that new chief executive Tom Mockridge has decided against a paywall.
News International has finally decided against introducing usage fees for The Sun’s website and is performing a restructure to place more emphasis on advertising sales, paidContent understands.
The Sun will introduce a paid mobile content app imminently; it is currently consulting with readers on the appropriate fee. But it will not be following Rupert Murdoch’s edict in which he appeared to say that all his news titles’ websites should charge.
There was a fascinating session at the World Editors Forum today titled ‘looking beyond the article’, which saw a number of speakers discuss the news game, and the ways news outlets are using gamification methods to offer wider context and understanding to news stories, events and scenarios.
One of the first speakers, Bill Adair, who is founder and editor of PolitiFact said he felt there was “a tremendous lack of imagination” in the industry in how to take advantage of new publishing platforms.
It’s like we’ve been given a brand new canvas with this whole palette of colours and we’re only painting in grey. We need to bring all the other colours to this new canvas.
He later said:
Many of us are slaves to our content management systems, which are slaves to the old way we were publishing. We have to think beyond that.
Scott Klein, editor of news applications at ProPublica, shared many examples of news apps which are doing just that. Klein’s presentation of these examples can be found at this link.
He told the conference that as well as adding context a news app has the ability to personalise and place the user at the centre of the story and offer them the ability to see the impact on them, “it doesn’t just tell a story, it tells your story”, he said.
You can hear him speak more about this in the audio interview below:
Another member of the panel was Bobby Schweizer, co-author of Newsgames: Journalism at Play. He said video games give the opportunity to look beyond the traditional news story and called on conference delegates to try and “make something”.
And he himself is trying to help make this happen, working on the development of new software called the Cartoonist to help journalists produce their own news games, a project which won Knight News funding last year.
In the short audio clip below I ask him more about what this software will offer journalists:
When asked about the implications of news games being able to be created quickly and potentially running alongside more breaking forms of the story, Schweizer said news outlets and journalists need to ask themselves why they are making the game.
You have to ask what do you have to gain over a written article? If you only need to answer who, what, when and where maybe you don’t need a game. This has to be a balance that each organisation will have to find for themselves.
“Don’t be afraid” – this was just one of many messages given by a panel of publishers at the World Editors Forum today, who shared their experiences of erecting “paywalls” or what came to be termed by the panel as “leaky walls”.
The panel featured three news outlets which have all established paid-content systems in their own ways, although the general approach appeared to be the same, leave holes in the “paywall”.
Dirk Nolde, managing editor of Berliner Morgenpost Online in Germany spoke first, outlining the site’s paid-content model which is free for print subscribers, or 4.90 euros a month. Only some content is placed behind the wall, including local news and sports, which are charged on different models, such as by day or month etc. “Make the assets paid”, he said.
The site also offers a “first-click-free”, such as via Google or social media, which works three times a day. ” We are trying to be leaky with the paywall,” he added.
The results so far is that we have 11,000 digital subscribers which includes print subscribers who can register for free. We thought it would be horrifying but we were wrong, visits went up.
According to his statistics in December 2009, the year in which the “paywall” was set up, visits stood at 2.4 million. In September 2010 this had risen to 3.3 million and last month, in September 2011 it was at 5.1 million.
It didn’t really hurt us, we were able to tell the readers and our users there’s quality behind this paywall.
But he said the site is looking to move to a more metered model.
We will give away more stuff, use a softer approach. It is about being able to accommodate users with the fact we think you should pay for content. That’s our mission.
Fellow panel member, Matus Kostolny, editor-in-chief of SME in Slovakia, discussed how they joined up to the Piano project, a group paywall used by nine news outlets in Slovakia.
The project was set up by Piano Media. I spoke to chief executive of Piano Media Tomas Bella after the panel to find out where the company is going in the near future.
The paywall was erected in May this year. On SME it costs 2.90 euros a month or 29 euros a year and, just like Berliner Morgenpost Online, is free to print subscribers. Also similarly only some content is behind “the wall”, such as opinion and political news, the wall is removed for big stories and SME is also considering a more metered wall.
But he added that is is important to remember that “behind stories are real human beings doing real jobs that are worth paying for”.
Public opinion is one of the things we want to influence and we believe it’s so important people pay for it, but if we don’t pursuade enough people then we’ll lose our inflence. We are thinking of different ways to change the structure of paid content and still think that in the end the journalism is worth to pay for and we will pursuade our readers to do it.
Revenue for the first month across all nine sites was 40,000 euros, “which was successful story for our market”, he added.
We were afraid we would lose readers but in the end we didn’t lose anybody, there is an increase of five per cent in unique viitors. We were afraid we would lose readers in locked sections but not losing them so much.
Later he added that one of the biggest lessons is not to be afraid to experiment.
The final speaker was assistant managing editor of digital content at the New York Times, Jim Roberts, who shared some interesting details on the Times’ model, which we reported on here. He told the conference the Times’ pay model is “based on number of principles”.
We try to strike a very delicate balance betwee keeping as open as possible to news junkies, but also really wanted to instill a sense of value for our loyalists who continue to consume quality journalism.
We wanted our regular users to pay. They came to our site and still do, frequently. We felt they understood the sense of value and they would want to pay for it as many of them had done for their print subscription.
Concluding the panel the speakers were asked to share their main lessons. Dirk Nolde gave three which nicely rounded off the session:
Communication, communication, communication – you have to tell users what you are doing
This is no supermarket. We’re not selling everything, they don’t have to pay for everything. You have to give things away to accomodate readers.
Produce online content that’s really worthy of being paid for. That convinces readers and makes them say “wow that was good”.
At the World Editors Forum today editor-in-chief of German news site Zeit Online, Wolfgang Blau, discussed the company’s decision to build a html5-optimised site to present the website on the tablet instead of a native app, which is instead used alongside its print products.
Some of the advantages for this model, as cited by Blau included having shorter product cycles which are better suited to the web environment, lower development and maintenance costs and the opportunity for higher advertising revenue.
I spoke to him after the session to get more detail on Zeit Online’s approach:
During our conversation I mention Apple’s new subscription rules and the concerns this raised for some publishers about lost revenue and the lack of a direct relationship with the audience and related data.
When Apple first announced its new subscription plans in February they states that “customers purchasing a subscription through the App Store will be given the option of providing the publisher with their name, email address and zip code when they subscribe”.
The first session of the day at the World Editors Forum in Vienna today was a conversation with Stefan Tweraser, head of Google Germany.
During the Q&A session Tweraser faced the inevitable questions about whether or not Google is friend or enemy to publishers.
If you would join me for a small experiment, close your eyes and imagine a world without Google, would you fare better or worse? I think it’s difficult to answer because in 2010 alone Google has paid 6 billion US dollars to publishers worldwide. And on average every minute Google provides publishers with 100,000 business opportunities in terms of traffic.
… More than 80 per cent of people use a search engine when looking for content online. One couldn’t exist without the other.
The moderator mentioned that some saw the relationship as one of “mutual complaint”. Tweraser responded to say Google is transparent about what it does, and enables publishers to easily opt out.
Google News gathers news content from over 50,000 publishers and that number continues to rise and rise. On the other hand, if publishers don’t want to be found, there is one piece of code they put on their website so we don’t find them. We are very transparent.
Tweraser also made reference to Google’s new joint paid content platform OnePass, which launched in February, and provides users with a single point of payment for content across a variety of websites.
There is a need for a payment aggregator for paid content and that’s what we’ve been doing with OnePass. We’re still building partnerships. There is enough of an opportunity for joint business models.
When asked for more details on whether other publishers have signed up, and plans to push the platform out more widely, Tweraser seemed to keep his cards close to his chest.
We have launched in several markets and we are actively looking for more partnerships. We are open for business with OnePass.
He added that it’s “in Google’s DNA to partner”, and called for publishers to view it as such.
Google News lives because it partners with more than 50,000 and shares revenue with them on a very significant scale. We are open to partnerships in almost any aspect of our business.
… The one recommendation I can give you: view Google as a partner who’s standing there with open arms.
Google News UK has had a makeover. The site today (Friday, 30 September) launched a new Editors’ Picks feature, enabling publishers to highlight content within Google News; and several new features, including increased personalisation of the site.
Editors’ Picks is a new section of the Google News homepage, displaying original content that publishers have selected as highlights from their publications.
Google told Journalism.co.uk that publishers can select long-form investigative features, photo slideshows, interactive maps, charts or other content to engage readers of online news.
The Telegraph, the Guardian, BBC News, Channel 4 News, Metro, the Daily Mirror, and the Independent already have content available, and the product is available for publishers at this link, (which Journalism.co.uk has today used to apply to be included in Editors’ Picks).
Users can use the slider feature to increase or decrease the amount of news they receive from a particular outlet.
In a release, Madhav Chinnappa, Google’s head of news partnerships in Europe said:
We’ve been working with partners for some time now to create innovative new ways for them to engage readers of news online. Editors’ Picks gives publishers a place to bring together the best of traditional and digital journalism; promoting long-form stories and experimenting with new formats.
Bloomberg reported late on Wednesday (28 September) that News Corporation’s iPad-only newspaper the Daily has been averaging around 120,000 readers a week, said to be “less than a quarter of the number the company said it needs to make money”.
The figures came from advertising executive working with the publication.
News Corp., whose Chief Executive Officer Rupert Murdoch personally introduced the publication about eight months ago, may have even fewer paying subscribers since people can read the Daily free for two weeks. The 120,000 figure is for so-called unique weekly visitors, which includes people who pay and those who don’t, said John Nitti, executive vice president of Publicis Groupe SA (PUB)’s media-buying division Zenith Optimedia.
Bloomberg adds that Murdoch had said in February the publication, which was launched in February, would need 500,000 subscribers “to break even”.
Google News unveiled a new feature during a session at the Online News Association Conference in Boston at the weekend which will allow publishers to highlight their top content and give “even more credit where credit is due”, according to the Google blog.
At present the so-called “standout content” tag is only available on the US edition of Google News and it is not clear from the Google blog when it plans to roll out the new feature in the UK.
The Google blog explains how news sites can flag up top content:
If you put the tag in the HTML header of one of your articles, Google News may show the article with a ‘featured’ label on the Google News homepage and News search results. The syntax for this new tag is as follows:
Standout content tags work best when news publishers recognise not just their own quality content, but also the original journalistic contributions of others when your stories draw from the standout efforts of other publications. Linking out to other sites is well recognised as a best practice on the web, and we believe that citing others’ standout content is important for earning trust as you also promote your own standout work.
Google is asking news sites to use the tag a maximum of seven times a week so that it can recognise what is exceptional content.
The 10,000 Words blog was at Online News Association Conference and has more on the launch of the feature.
