Robert Hardie's blog
I blog, therefore I amArchive for November, 2011
Cross-media promotion just made us cross
John Meehan’s Publishing article had much in it to be recommended, particularly its sensible approach to the daily-to-weekly drift and focus on tablets as the medium-of-choice for the next generation of news consumers.
But at its heart is a presumption that print performance in terms of sales can be influenced either positively or negatively by digital performance, an issue John and I often crossed swords on when he was a Northcliffe print editor and I was Digital Publishing Director.
With 20+ daily titles and their news feeds to contrast and compare, we had the luxury of being able to take different approaches to content volumes/timings in terms of uploading to the websites and then look at their impact. At different times – often for very long periods of time – we uploaded all content and no content, full versions and truncated versions, pre-print and post-print, and on some websites we promoted the print title to the nth degree while on some others it was never mentioned.
What was interesting – and sobering – was that no matter what approach was taken to digital, the performance of the print title was totally unaffected – the sales decline of otherwise identical papers was identical despite them taking totally opposite approaches to digital publishing.
My instinct was that trying to sell one of your products by making another one of your products less good that it could be was not a strong marketing logic, and that turned out to be the case.
Sadly, given our ability to promote print via digital and vice versa, what also turned out to be true was that doing both turned out to have no positive effect either. People buy or don’t buy papers and use or don’t use websites because of how good or bad papers or websites they are, not because they’ve read about one in the other.
Job losses in Kent were sadly inevitable
The news that Kent Messenger is now seeking voluntary redundancies in the wake of its thwarted bid to buy seven rival Northcliffe-owned titles is as unsurprising as it is saddening.
I hope there will now be much soul searching within the Office of Fair Trading, which referred the proposed deal to the Competition Commission for a full inquiry knowing that neither KM nor Northcliffe would be prepared to bear its costs and so the deal would be killed.
The key factor needs to be quality, not quantity, and fewer journalists means worse papers.
Asda link was more telling that the Mafia one
When the History of Hackgate comes to be written, much will be said about the role of Tom Watson.
Most commentators have been queuing up to praise him, quite in contrast to the very early days of the developing story when all his colleagues told him he was mad to take on the (then mighty) Murdoch press and only the Guardian really seemed to care very much.
Not now, of course, with the revelation that murdered teenager Millie Dowler’s phone had been hacked by the now-defunct News of the World probably the game-changer.
Mr Watson got to cross swords with James Murdoch again last week in the Commons Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport but failed again to land a killer blow, although he did grab the headlines with his Omerta allegations.
Fascinatingly, I think his “You must be the only Mafia boss in history not to know he was running a criminal enterprise” line backfired – it was way too much. More telling was MP Philip’s Davies comparison of James Murdoch’s “cavalier” attitude to money with that of the COO of Asda.
Ridicule is always more powerful that grandstanding.
Deciding how much profit is enough profit holds key to threatened titles
Without any insider knowledge I can’t possible know how much effort – and with which parties – was put into the possible sale of Trinity’s tree Midlands titles prior to the announcement of their closure yesterday.
My instinct, however, is that however much effort was put into it was directed at what we might call the normal suspects – other publishing groups.
How much consideration, I wonder, was put into an alternative future for the titles – one much in keeping with their far history than their near one.
The currently large publishing groups of which Trinity is one came about not from the instantaneous establishment of all theta titles at the same time, rather by the acquisition over time of titles founded independently much earlier.
Newspapers, certainly those with long histories, tended to be founded by local business people as local businesses run very locally. As such, the returns on investment made in them were consequently lower.
What the founders of publishing groups saw was that economies of scale could build on both the successes of the initial titles and the relative buoyancy of the economic conditions of the time and that aggregations of titles could produce profits greater than the sum of their parts.
Fast forward to today and viewed through the lens of the economics of Big Publishing and the returns that are now expected, many of these previously aggregated titles will fault to produce substantial enough profits to warrant their place in the enlarged portfolios. Crucially, though, it’s not that they could not produce any profit, merely that they could not produce enough profit.
The definition of “enough” in relation to profit is critical here – judged in purely local business terms they may well produce ‘enough” profit to be viable – and certainly if run in conjunction, say, with a local academic institution such as a University that has an agenda for their existence not so closely tied to finance.
What is for certain, however, is that the dynamic for such a local solution to be found to the problem that many daily and weekly titles face will not come from Big Publishing – it will come, if it is to come at all, from Little Publishing. Local entrepreneurs prepared to take a fresh look at the economics of the press need to step up to the mark, not merely lament the demise of their local newspaper.
Sad, but not surprising, to see another three titles closed
The news that Trinity Mirror’s review of its Midlands titles has resulted in the closure of three titles is both sad and unsurprising.
The redrawing of the media map is a work in progress and the economics of Trinity’s business mean that cost-cutting has to be the order of the day.
Northcliffe has chosen the route of turning dailies into weeklies, Trinity a trimming of its portfolio. Neither option is preferable, but on balance the first is probably more palatable.
Leveson and Lawrence show the bad and good of the Press
Without exception, all the major media organisations ran the opening of the Leveson Inquiry and the start of the Stephen Lawrence murder trial in their news agendas yesterday, and rightly so. The irony that the two should begin on the same day wasn’t lost on me.
Publishers will be desperately trying to push their “don’t throw the baby out with the bath water” line to Leveson as he looks at the ethics of newsgathering and the phone hacking scandal, but just as the Guardian was able to expose phone hacking in a way that the Police failed to do, so too is the Daily Mail rightly credited with campaigning for justice for Stephen Lawrence in the face of apathy from most of the other concerned agencies.
The trial of the two men may or may not identify his killers, but it is Lord Leveson and his committee should always keep front of mind that the Press is able to do right as well as wrong and whatever recommendations they bring forward must not diminish the former in a manner disproportionate to the ills of the latter.
Focus on National masks the really big issue
I fear he’s fighting a losing battle, but Neil Fowler is right to seek to redress the balance between national and local/regional as far as debates over the future of the media is concerned.
By both European and World standards we are dramatically over-newspapered when it comes to the national press and if, as I’m convinced we will, we lose at least one broadsheet and one tabloid title over the new two years we will still be over-newspapered.
The same cannot be said, however, for the local/regional media, where daily titles are becoming weekly ones at an increasing pace and weekly ones are disappearing for ever.
Plurality of media ownership is a valid concern, but so is the crucial role that local and regional media play in shining a light on the workings not of the sexy end of the political and business worlds but at the distinctly unsexy one – Magistrates’ Courts, local councils and businesses/individuals that may not be high profile but can ruin people’s lives just the same.
Brand extension model for Hyperlocal may be the way forward
Iain Hepburn is the latest journalist to muse over the question of what part, if any, Big Publishing can play in Little Publishing.
My views on this are well known and not new, and Iain rightly focuses on the fact that Big Media chooses to ignore when looking at its Little Publishing business models – UGC costs.
The fundamental problem Big Publishing has, of course, is that if hyperlocal doesn’t make the sorts of returns traditional publishing does then it has abandon its mindset of “we make money through publishing, this is publishing, therefore we will make money from this”.
AOL has been reported to be $160m a year on Patch, its hyperlocal offering in the States, DMGT’s losses on LocalPeople are nowhere near that big but are substantial losses all the same, and the Guardian has pulled the plug on its hyperlocal offering before launching notice last month.
Perhaps the STV approach Iain highlights of using hyperlocal as a gateway to customers for larger brands, rather than as a business division expected to contribute to the bottom line, is the future for Big Publishing in Little Publishing.
Vince’s bin bag blunder was a win for the Local
I just love the fact that the latest Vince Cable gaffe was a scoop not by a National but by a Local.
The Business Secretary’s office had been discarding constituency and Government correspondence unshredded and in bags outside his Richmond office but wasn’t outed by anything as clever as the Daily Telegraph’s hidden microphones that led to the row over his comments about “declaring war On Murdoch” in 2010.
Instead, it was a rubbish collector who took the evidence to the local weekly – the Richmond and Twickenham Times.
The Times’ story was immediately picked up by all the national titles and broadcasters, and Mr cable was forced to issue an immediate apology.
I suspect the speed with which news editors across the country sent reports off to check MPs’ office bins was only matched by the speed with which MPs bought shredders.
There’s merit in outsourcing local radio provision
I did like the line in Andrew Harrison’s contribution to the Radio Festival in Salford that the BBC should consider outsourcing some local radio provision to the commercial sector, even if only on a trial basis to begin with.
As Andrew, the chief executive of the RadioCentre, pointed out, it would be a logical extension of the 25% requirement for TV output to be produced outside the BBC.
He’s understandably only focused on this trial including existing commercial operations, but the lure of major funding from the BBC would surely encourage new would-be broadcasters with different and more future-focused business models to look at local news provision afresh.
