Free business newspaper City AM will launch in the two cities in spring next year, managing director Lawson Munchaster told an industry gathering.
Expected circulation of the title outside of London is 50,000.
In a follow up to Tuesday’s announcement that the Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCe) will provide user profiles alongside stats on page impressions and unique users, Guy Lipscombe, managing director of Survey Interactive – the firm behind the on-site surveys being used for the research – explained how the ‘enhanced ABCe certificates’ would work at yesterday’s Regional Media Research Forum (RMRF) event:
[audio:http://www.journalism.co.uk/sounds/GuyLipscombe.mp3]Lipscombe was joined by Sally O’Donnell, strategic marketing manager for Trinity Mirror Regionals (TMR), who let us in on some key findings from Survey Interactive’s audience research with the group, which involved on-site questionnaires completed by 53,313 interviewees across TM’s 110 regional and national websites:
According to O’Donnell, further research will be conducted soon, as the group’s digital audience continues to grow. Sales staff training on how best to use the figures collected by the research will also be implemented – with particular attention paid to the difference between stats for ‘adults’ and ‘unique users’ to the sites and how behaviour differs amongst print and online consumers.
You can watch an online interview with Kevin Eyres, managing director at LinkedIn Europe, at the AOP site.
He is talking to them ahead of next Wednesday’s AOP Digital Publishing Summit in London, where he will talk about LinkedIn’s existing and future partnerships with publishers.
“We feel very strongly that communities are gonna be part of the publishers’ future,” he said.
Eyres says that the professional network site, on average, attracts one member every two seconds.
The Daily Mail & General Trust is to merge its regional and national newspaper divisions under a new management structure.
The new department of A&N Media will be headed by existing Associated Newspapers managing director Kevin Beatty, who will add the responsibility to his current role.
Beatty will effectively take control of Northcliffe’s regional newspapers and websites as part of the changes, paidContent reports.
Mark Scott, managing director Australian broadcaster ABC, has called for a digital TV channel broadcasting full-length, uncut press conferences and parliamentary hearings.
A new video player – courtesy of Perform and Virgin Media – is just the start for Sport magazine’s ‘nascent’ website, Greg Miall, managing director, told Journalism.co.uk.
Traditionally television’s domain, online sports video from other media sites is a growing trend. By working with a third party, however, rights to the content are handled by Virgin, which supplies Premier League football highlights, and Perform, which handles video of cricket, tennis, golf and rugby fixtures.
“It’s a different way to supply a latent audience demand for this kind of content,” said Miall, adding that the BBC’s recent online coverage of the Beijing Olympics was a benchmark for online sports video.
“What it did [the BBC’s Olympics site] was provide another way of viewing all this content and a lot more people ended up looking at content, which they might not look at usually.”
Improvements are lined up for the player and embedding it across the site’s other channels is also in the pipeline.
In addition, an online channel manager is set to join the magazine in the next few weeks and will bring in a series of changes to the site, Miall added.
The key thinking behind the video offering, he said, is to appeal to a generation of readers and viewers who aren’t watching television for prolonged periods or through a set anymore.
So is short-form, online sports video the freesheet equivalent of television?
Le Figaro is predicting that 20% of its revenue will be generated by its online operations by 2010.
But the French newspaper has plans to beat this, Pierre Conte, deputy managing director for new media and advertising for Le Figaro Group, told delegates at the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) conference today.
After rising from 2 million unique users to its websites to 8 million in two years, the group’s web traffic now accounts for 1 French internet user out of every four.
Last year its online revenues accounted for 13% of its total income – so how will the publisher build on this?
Gradual integration
Online success will only be achieved if all the group’s editorial teams want to take part, Francis Morel, managing director, said.
As such Le Figaro adopted an ‘invite not assign’ policy, giving journalists the opportunity to do work for the websites if they wished (though initially for no extra pay).
According to Morel merging editorial teams for print and online was seen as essential, despite concerns raised by the unions.
Journalists became increasingly enthusiastic about working for the websites and now both editorial teams are on the same floor under the same editorial head, though Morel insists this has been about building bridges and not enforced integration.
Advertising
The group has sought to recoup floundering revenues from print classifieds by making a concerted push with this advertising online, setting up a team to find advertisers for online-only.
Contextual and behavioural advertising is also being experimented with.
E-commerce and diversification
Building around the flagship portal of Le Figaro, the publisher has launched specialist sport, finance and lifestyle websites, in addition to acquiring several e-commerce sites.
Content has also been syndicated to other websites, though this is not a long-term business model, Conte says.
“This business [selling content to other websites] will continue to be weak and limited. We need to work on ad revenue. We are not reinventing anything by saying that, but we need to integrate our sales house.”
Content
News remains a priority online for all the group’s content-based websites. On the Le Figaro site a commenting function has been added to articles and submissions from users are welcomed.
Le Figaro has also set up its own TV studio to produce video clips for online and mobile.
As a word of warning, Morel stresses that the digital developments in these areas have not been at the expense of the print product.
“It is indispensable to continue to invest and focus on print, because while the internet is a key territory, it will not replace print.
“We need to be extremely cautious and prudent. The internet is a very volatile market. We need to be very flexible at any time to change our course because we do not know what tomorrow holds.”
Some significant differences between the figures for unique users visiting UK newspaper sites released by Nielsen Online today and those announced by the Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCe) last week.
While both rank the Guardian as the most popular in the UK, Nielsen’s figures suggest the site attracted 3 million unique users in the UK in April compared to 7,762,826 recorded by the ABCe.
The Telegraph attracted 2.7 million UK uniques in April, according to Nielsen – around 3.5 million less than the figure reported by the ABCe.
By the Nielsen figures the Sun attracted 1.9 million UK unique users, the Times 1.8 million and the Daily Mail 1.7 million over the same period.
Nielsen calculates its traffic figures using a panel-based method called NetView, which the company describes as ‘around 45,000 UK internet users who have opted in to download a meter which records all their PC, online and application usage on a continual and ongoing basis.’
In contrast, websites register themselves with the ABCe, which then audits data on web traffic recorded by the sites.
Very different methods – very different results.
Interestingly Nielsen also provides data on the ‘engagement’ of UK unique users with a site, differentiating between ‘heavy’ (>15 minutes), ‘medium'(>5 – >=15 minutes) and ‘light'(<=5 minutes) users.
The results of this analysis suggest the most popular online newspapers – the Guardian and Telegraph – have the highest percentage of light visitors (with 83%and 81% respectively).
The results for engagement in full:
Sun: 14% heavy, 16% medium, 70% light
Times: 13% heavy, 17% medium, 70% light
Daily Mail: 12% heavy, 14% medium,75% light
Telegraph: 7% heavy, 12% medium, 81% light
Guardian: 6% heavy, 11% medium, 83% light
The figures suggest that the Times is the only title to have gained in ‘heavy’ users since January 2008, while the Telegraph has recorded the biggest increase in ‘light’ users over the same period.
As Stephen Brooks, UK managing director for Nielsen Online, pointed out in the release: “Analysing the Telegraph’s audience by heavy, medium and light visitors reveals their dramatic growth in popularity is concentrated around light users, which could be due to the site’s improved visibility in search results,”
“This encapsulates the ‘reach vs engagement’ conundrum that newspaper sites face – is the best path to financial success attracting the most visitors or having a smaller core of more engaged users?”
ITV has appointed Andy Baker as managing director of its Friends Reunited Group.
Baker joins the company from Trinity Mirror, where he was director of digital recruitment.
Baker’s appointment marks a board-wide shake-up of the group, with Michael Murphy, Tim Ward and Rob Mogford, the co-owners of Friends Reunited, all changing roles by the end of 2008.
Current CEO Murphy will join the Friends Reunited board as a non-executive director, while Ward will move from marketing director to a similar position for ITV Consumer.
Changes to Mogford’s role will not take place until after 2008, an ITV press release said.
Journalism.co.uk wrote a story last week about comments RBI managing director Jim Muttram made to the PPA conference about performance related pay for journalists.
Back on his own blog Jim has posted about the hubbub surrounding the issue.
“If any pay for performance scheme were ever to be implemented in a blanket fashion that very well might be the result – which, for the record, would be a bad thing!
“However, in an online world where attention is firstly more valued and more difficult to get, and secondly increasingly measurable it surely comes as no surprise that questions about how to maximise it arise from time to time.”
I recommend a click through to read the whole post.