Guardian | *contains graphic material

January 25, 2010

Alan Rusbridger: so where’s the Guardian sleepwalking to, exactly?

Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of the Guardian has been in the news today discussing, yes, paywalls. Quoted at length but full article here:

The Guardian editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger, has delivered a riposte to Rupert Murdoch’s campaign to introduce paywalls to newspaper websites, claiming that it could lead the industry to a “sleepwalk into oblivion”.

“If we turn our back on all this and at the same time conclude that there is nothing to learn from it then, never mind business models, we could be sleepwalking into oblivion.

“If you erect a universal pay wall around your content then it follows you are turning away from a world of openly shared content. Again, there may be sound business reasons for doing this, but editorially it is about the most fundamental statement anyone could make about how newspapers see themselves in relation to the newly-shaped world.”

The Guardian editor told an audience of academics and journalists in London that it is more important than ever to focus on journalism: “If you think about journalism, not business models, you can become rather excited about the future. If you only think about business models you can scare yourself into total paralysis.”

Now contrast with this article, also from the Guardian:

Guardian News & Media managing director Brooks told staff in a memo posted on the company intranet yesterday that the current rate of losses at GNM, which publishes the two national newspapers and the guardian.co.uk website network, which includes MediaGuardian.co.uk, was “unsustainable”.

Brooks added that GNM was losing £100,000 a day, a rate that its parent company, Guardian Media Group ”cannot afford”.

In July Guardian Media Group has posted a pre-tax loss of £89.8m for the year to 29 March, with GNM reporting an operating loss of £36.8m.

I yield to no man in my conviction that the Guardian and guardian.co.uk are absolute first-rate media organs … but do you really want business advice from the organisation that’s losing £100,000 a day (yes! every single day!)? The truth is these days you can’t and shouldn’t keep journalism and business models in distinct silos, never letting them communicate with one another. That’s how things used to be done, back when newspapers were making truckloads of money. It’s all part of the same conversation, and so it should be. (A good start would be by guardian.co.uk moderators not deleting my entirely inoffensive comments on their site, I assume because I gently poked fun at Rusbridger …)

Here’s to more, and better, thinking about and discussion of business models, and less sleepwalking to oblivion, or wherever the Guardian is heading.

November 30, 2009

ABCes: why?

The ABCes have just been released (why always on a Friday?), which leads to 2 things: publishers congratulating themselves about their performance and everyone else asking who really cares.

What’s bizarre about this is it seems unique to newspapers (I don’t see the monthly search engine metrics or the monthly social network figures each month) and that no-one beyond the newspapers themselves really seems to be asking for it. Agencies and clients all seem pretty disinterested in the whole spectacle, and you can hardly blame them, since it seems entirely out of step with the rest of the digital industry. I mean, newspapers are not a special category online – the average user doesn’t really distinguish between news content on a newspaper site, the BBC, Sky or MSN. If we are going to report monthly figures, let’s have a fuller picture of the online environment. Hopefully this is what might happen once UKOM launches

And, of course, the numbers are virtually meaningless: 30m unique users for a British newspaper site when there’s only 45m adults in the country! Take 30m users and filter out …

1. Unique people rather than browsers/machines/devices; your 30m is now closer to 10m

2. All non-UK traffic; 10m becomes 4m

3. Bounced traffic (i.e. all who view one page then leave); 4m becomes 2.5m

4. Visitors for less than 30 seconds; 2.5m is now 1.5m

5. Then look at daily traffic rather than monthly. After all a newspaper is made to be consumed every day, not once a month; that’s why all the content is updated every day. 1.5m becomes ~800k? If you’re lucky? Feels a lot less impressive than 30m doesn’t it?

November 4, 2009

link overload

Interesting piece here showing how much news site homepages are overloaded with links. Apparently we at Mirror Group have 94% of our homepage content linking somewhere else … much higher than say Guardian.co.uk at 62% and Dailymail.co.uk at 77% (although they all seem fairly high…)

There’s some commentary from Steve Evans on his blog saying it shows “a complete disregard for user experience”, which you can see the logic of. There’s far too much on any one of these sites (almost 2,000 words on the guardian.co.uk homepage, and 350 individual links) for someone to consume; it just (theoretically) keeps people in a loop of links, viewing barely relevant pages, and generating ad impressions.

… it does raise the question though of how else you would organise all the content a newspaper generates other than a mass of text and links. There’s very few other content vehicles such as a newspaper in the world, producing enough words to fill a small novel every day. Not linking to this content from the homepage would mean expecting users to funnel through a navigation system and find it themselves, in much the same way that users leaf through a newspaper from front to back … that is, exactly the way people don’t view online content. I’m just not sure how you could make it work.

Below is a nice ‘hmmm’ graphic accompanying the paidcontent article

l = links, w = words, lw = linked words

*contains graphic material

Category: Guardian