Tag Archives: online audience

Guardian Weekly offers subscription deal via Twitter

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We write about Twitter and its applications for journalism and publishing a lot.

But a tweet from @guardianweekly, the twitter account for the Guardian’s weekly international newspaper, caught Journalism.co.uk’s eye this week:

Guardian Weekly Twitter update

The promised deal has been introduced – four weeks for free and 50% off an initial three-month subscription – and around 100 people have aleady clicked through to the sign-up page, editor Natalie Bennett told Journalism.co.uk.

“We started out on Twitter not quite sure what it was. But now there are a lot of people following us and we’re picking up our kind of people. Many of these might not have an a subscription however,” said Bennett.

As such, using Twitter is a great way to cross promote and suggest the offline edition to a different online audience, she says.

While the Guardian Weekly team won’t have the figures through for a while on which Twitter followers have made the leap to a subscription – this doesn’t matter, says Bennett: “Twitter doesn’t actually cost us anything, so the conversion doesn’t have to be particularly huge.”


FT’s Gapper’s response to Guardian’s Emily Bell’s response to John Gapper’s ‘cut-and-pasting’ (or aggregating) comment

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John Gapper’s column on FT.com asks whether it is time for the Ochs-Sulzberger family to sell the New York Times. No, Gapper says: “They would be crazy to cap their run of poorly timed transactions by selling in the trough of the recession, amid mayhem in the industry.”

As part of the commentary he also makes this claim:

“Meanwhile, it [the New York Times] produces more original stories than most rivals put together. The UK’s Guardian is another paper that has built a global brand from what was a regional paper, but it relies more on cut-and-pasting (or aggregating) from others.”

Emily Bell, director of digital content at Guardian.co.uk responds in the comments: “It is a pity an interesting piece was spoiled by such a sloppy and inaccurate piece of reporting,” she says. We have reproduced an extract from her lengthy comment below (yes, cut and pasted):

“John, in your column you asset [sic] that the Guardian has grown its online audience primarily by aggregating and cutting and pasting other people’s stories. This is demonstrably not true. If you look at our site on any given day (www.guardian.co.uk), you will I am sure find stories which are either from a wire feed (rather as the FT uses) or which reporters have picked up from other sources, again as does the BBC, FT, Times , even sometime the hallowed NYT. But this is not the core of what we do and it is certainly not how we have grown our audience…”

“(…)We have built our traffic on a higher investment in original multimedia journalism than most if not all of our peers. We have an active policy NOT to routinely aggregate high-grossing showbusiness, celebrity or ‘weird’ stories from elsewhere, which is common practice among some newspaper websites.”

And Gapper quickly responds (Journalism.co.uk wonders what is happening to journalism: shouldn’t they be in the pub by now on a Friday evening?):

“In fact, I don’t assert that. What I wrote was:

“”Meanwhile, it [the NYT] produces more original stories than most rivals put together. The UK’s Guardian is another paper that has built a global brand from what was a regional paper, but it relies more on cut-and-pasting (or aggregating) from others.”

“So I am comparing the Guardian’s ratio with that of the NYT, not claiming that the Guardian contains more aggregated than original content. I do not believe the latter, and would not write it.”

Media Release: CNN International / Ericsson’s joint research

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This was announced yesterday, the findings of joint research between CNN International and Ericsson, as part of the company’s promotion of its ‘Race-for-Growth’ multi-platform advertising campaign.

“CNN has revealed that the international business elite are increasingly accessing the internet while on the move,” the release said.

Among the findings were these statistics:

  • “56 per cent of respondents with mobile internet, access online content whilst on the move for example, via a mobile device or wireless LAN.”
  • “Three quarters (73 per cent) of CNN’s online audience of global citizens share user-generated video content.”

Full release at this link…

Yorkshire Evening Post launches online TV series

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The Yorkshire Evening Post is to launch its own web-tv series investigating six haunted buildings in Leeds, writes Sinead Scanlon for Journalism.co.uk.

A team from the Post will be joined by television medium Barrie John and ‘paranormal investigator’ Lynne Robinson, a press release from Johnston Press said.

The paper is hoping to appeal to an international online audience with the series, which will also be hosted on a separate website hauntedleeds.co.uk.

“This series represents the opportunities the web has given newspapers like ours. With this series, we’re hopefully going to show what can be achieved by pushing our own relatively modest understanding of video to its limit,” said Geoff Fox, Yorkshire Evening Post’s digital editor and series producer.

“It’s a testament to the willingness of our staff to adapt and embrace modern technology to enable them to successfully explore new mediums outside the realms of print.”

Invisible Inkling: Why the Philadelphia Inquirier is moving away from web-first publishing

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Ryan Sholin speaks to Chris Krewson, executive editor of online and news at the Philadelphia Inquirer, about why the paper is shifting away from a web-first publishing strategy.

Feature pieces, big name critics and restaurant reviews, for example, will be published in print first, as part of changes aimed at understanding the differences between the paper’s print and online audience.

Living obituaries for journalists?

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The Columbia Journalism Review is asking for contributions to its Parting Thoughts series – a chance for journalists on their way out of the business to share their thoughts on why and what next for the industry.

In one ‘letter’ in the series, Jim Spencer, who was ‘involuntarily separated’ from the Denver Post, recalls his reaction to the news:

“My scoop didn’t matter. Neither did the ten writing awards I won in four years and three months as a metro columnist with the Post. The late nights and occasional weekends I put in, the blog I maintained in deference to the burgeoning online audience—none of it counted.”

Spencer went on to earn ‘twice as much as my co-workers’ writing for SpencerSpeaks.com, but now works in PR for the University of Colorado.

BBC annual report: executive bonuses remain despite job cuts and calls for management restructure

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The BBC’s executive directors’ pay rose by £708,000 in 2007/8 with pay for the 10 directors totalling £4,960,000, according to figures from the corporation’s annual report.

Jana Bennett, director of BBC Vision, received a bonus of £41,000, while outgoing director of Future Media & Technology Ashley Highfield received £34,000. Director general Mark Thompson rejected the offer of an annual bonus.

Both the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) and BECTU have challenged the rises in light of 2,500 proposed job cuts at the corporation announced in October.

“Management should have the decency to show restraint at a time when so many BBC staff are under huge pressures following major cutbacks. This announcement will only serve to disillusion staff further,” Paul McLaughlin, NUJ broadcasting organiser, said in a statement from the union.

Michael Lyons, chairman of the BBC Trust, reiterated the need to improve the management structure of bbc.co.uk before approving further investment. In May the site’s management was blamed for losing ‘effective control’ after a £36 million overspend.

More figures from the report:

  • average monthly page impressions for bbc.co.uk are more than 3.6 billion, while weekly unique users average more than 33 million;
  • BBC Mobile is the ‘most accessed’ mobile browser for news, sport and weather in the UK;
  • levels of audience trust in the BBC have remained steady year-on-year with 75 per cent of viewers rating BBC news programming as ‘fair, informed and balanced

BBC Worldwide

Analysis of BBC Worldwide (part of the annual report and separate reviews released) emphasised the importance of online in growing its global audience. The service’s online audience rose 34 per cent year-on-year. However, the review highlighted the failure of Spanish-language site BBC Mundo to meet the demands of increased internet access.

The launch of BBC Arabic came in for particular praise in the review, creating ‘trimedia’ BBC coverage in Arabic:

“With the launch of BBC Arabic television, our multimedia strategy took a giant step forward. That moment in March 2008 marked the successful culmination of a four-year journey to secure funding and deliver a high-quality television service in a vital region of the world.”

Online revenues accounted for 2.7 per cent of total sales for BBC Worldwide in 2007/8 – rising from 1.1 per cent previously, the report said. The creation of bbc.com and syndication deals with YouTube and iTunes were cited as key revenue drivers for the service.

Online Journalism Scandinavia: Norway’s leading news sites strategies for attracting online audience

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Image of Kristine LoweKristine Lowe is a freelance journalist who writes on the media industry for number of US, UK and Norwegian publications. This week Online Journalism Scandinavia looks at how Norway’s leading news sites attract their audiences. Continue reading →

Yahoo: US papers grew online audience 6 per cent last year

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According to data released by Newspaper Association of America and compiled by Nielsen Online, the online readership of US newspapers grew about 6 per cent last year.

Online reach of newspapers grew to 38 per cent of all active online users, up from 36 percent in 2006.

Newspapers had an average of 60 million unique US visitors per month in 2007, up from 56.4 million the year before.