WAN 2008 shows way forward for newspaper industry

The 2008 World Association of Newspapers (taking place in Sweden, 1-4 June) reports on positive findings for newspaper readership and audience - "global newspaper sales were up +2.57 percent over the year, and had increased +9.39 percent over the past five years" - but there are important messages for news providers online.

The Guardian's Roy Greenslade reported on the snappily titled session: "The new consumption model for news: why the old routine is over for the 18-34-year-olds" showing that young adults are overwhelmed by news and information from various media, 'news fatigue' is cited.

Also being time poor, they crave more "good quality in-depth reporting".

Associated Press have taken on board this feedback and put together a more integrated and convergent news model:

"1-2-3 filing," starting with a news alert for breaking news, followed by a short present-tense story for the web. The third step is to add details and to format stories in ways most appropriate for various platforms

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Quote from Roy Greenslade reporting from WAN 2008.

Greenslade also reports that "The old newspaper model is destined to die - so get over it!" Dean Singleton, chief executive MediaNews Group, adds:

"It's time to get over it and move to a print model that matches the times."

The "local and deep" rather than "broad but shallow" point is a telling image of one big problem regional/local newspaper websites face, trying to do too much with their own resources, spreading time and skills too thinly.

Inevitably some content or services fall short in terms of quality and the audience finds better sources. Quality content will shine through, doing less, but well is worth far more in terms of long term audience retention and revenue.

I think those inside the industry all knew this type of stinging but honest comment by Singleton was hitting the nail on the head a few years ago, but now it rings truer and louder than ever:

Singleton says that print has a chance in the future "if we discard our arrogance and our old ideas"

Web audience measurement

From: Measuring "engagement" online at Guardian: Organ Grinder:

Nielsen points out that publishers are having to look at different ways of assessing visitor numbers and usage, mostly because new technologies such as Ajax refresh page content without actually refreshing the whole page. That means the data would show a user had only viewed one page, but actually the content would have changed many times. Ah, the delights of web statistics...

Just say no to 'hits' measurement

Working in the new media industry I still find it's hard to get people used to measuring online success in terms of 'page impressions' and audience in 'Unique Visitors' (meanings of these below).

I find myself regularly (irritatingly condescendingly) correcting people who talk of 'hits', here's a definition of why hits are dead as a measurement of a web sites success:

"Hits: Requests for any single file on a Web server. A hit can be a request for a Web page or any element of that page, such as an image, a style sheet or an external JavaScript. Therefore, "hits" is a meaningless statistic for measuring Web traffic. A large number of hits on a website might mean that a site uses a lot of images or scripts on its pages, rather than that many people visit the site. "Unique visitors" over a defined period should be used to measure a site's popularity instead."

Measuring website statistics:

• Page impressions are the number of individual pages that are viewed on your site.


• Visits are the number of times a person or computer IP address is logged as having visited your site, regardless of how many pages the look at or what they do.


• Unique Users/Visitors are all the individual visitors to your site, if they visit more than once it still only counts as the same Unique Visitor of the chosen time period.

From the Online Journalism Review.

Building an online local newspaper in 2006

In a word, diversify. Online newspapers need to push on with their unique selling points; namely, local knowledge and a trusted brand bringing loyalty within the a local marketplace. These need to be visible online whilst providing a more user-driven site, accessible to all on any platform.

Aims & objectives

Encouraging interactivity and providing high standards of usability for users; using web standards and offering flexibility for the web producers.

Design & construction

• Usable and accessible to all potential users in any browser, on any platform (mobile, PDAs, etc).


• Clean design and layout, with clear branding links with any print editions.


• Consistent branding and navigation.


• Produced in semantic, web standard code (XHTML and CSS) to improve control of layout.


• Makes temporary changes within layout templates more flexible, make content viewable on any platform with minimum of extra development work and make future developments easier.

Content & features

The digital age is well and truly upon us, modern news providers are multimedia outlets where news is transmitted and received in new formats by ever hungry users devouring news and information as quickly as it is produced. As Media Guardian puts it: "With news websites starting to fill up with audio and video clips, we are seeing just the beginning of "convergence"."

• Regularly updated content, i.e. up to the minute news from the local news team.


• Follow-ups and updates of news from print edition. Established print working patterns would need to be augmented by an understanding of the web audience and skills in writing for the web.


• The written content would be more geared towards a web audience. Shorter sentences/paragraphs and use of bullet lists.


• Flexibility to change homepage features regularly with eye-catching content whilst keeping basic structure and layout.


• Use of audio and visual content to augment written articles (but not just for the sake of doing it).


• Alternative distribution methods: Email newsletters, RSS feeds, blogs, email alerts.


• Awareness of online news aggregators: Google News, Newsvine - "..to build a perfectly different, perfectly efficient way to read, write, and interact with the news." Read an analysis of Newsvine.


• Text containing terms related to article keywords more helpful for search engine ranking. Google's advice for your website: Content.

Relationship with the audience

• Giving them the content that they want, in the format they want it: RSS feeds, email updates for specific sections.


• Offer blogs, user feedback/input, blog comments.


• Still pushing commercial options.

Marketing & promotion

• Clear consistent branding across all off and online editions.


• Cross promotion of features and offers.


• Print edition pushing online only content and vice versa.

Revenue/Return on investment

• Targeted advertising within sections.


• Sponsorship of features/sections – cross-branded between off/online editions.


• Interactive competitions – use of SMS.


• Not overwhelming the homepage with advertising, but specific content can carry relevant advertising options.