ifra
Dietmar Schantin of IFRA’s Newsplex
Dietmar Schantin is director of Newsplex initiative at IFRA. IFRA is a global association of newspaper publishers and Newsplex is a consulting operation intended to help the association members move to the digital world. Dietmar’s speciality is integrating online and print operations at newspapers, something he was very involved with at Britain’s Daily Telegraph.
Dietmar Schantin of Newsplex on Newspapers’ New Channels
Had a great discussion today with Dietmar Schantin, director of IFRA’s Newsplex.
IFRA is a global association of newspaper publishers and Newsplex is a consulting operation intended to help the association members move to the digital world. Dietmar’s speciality is integrating online and print operations at newspapers, something he was very involved with at Britain’s Daily Telegraph.
In this rapidly developing digital world, there are many exciting new ways to communicate with those people formerly known as newspaper readers.
The problem - to Dietmar - is that newspapers seem to hate new technology until they love it too much. Once a paper falls in love with a new channel, the order goes out to “use video!!” or some other new channel. At that point every story is done in video, regardless of the merit of using video. This causes frustration since nobody understands why they should be investing resources in a channel that does not work.
Each channel should, as described in an excellent posting on Dietmar’s blog, offer its unique advantages to help build a broader brand loyalty. Channels should cross-pollenate for the greater good of the brand, in the way shown in this graphic.
In fact, each channel - including good old fashioned print - has its own strengths and weaknesses.
Some of Dietmar’s ideas on how channels are best used:
Video - Good for issues that involve emotion and moving colors. Newspapers should not compete with TV stations by showing straight news.
Social networks - Use the tools of social networking to build communities and get people involved. Use the ideas behind Facebook, but not necessarily Facebook.
Mobile - Great for breaking news updates and linking in with the database channel.
Database - Create directories that will be useful to your readers, this could include restaurant or - as one British paper did - a list of hospitals with those that do their job best.
Online - Unique strength is hyperlinking and allowing people to travel around the web.
Print - Great for portability and the “lean back” experience of information absorption.
Audio - Not a channel that has obvious strengths, but one newspaper has started doing high quality audio guides to recently opened exhibitions.
Face-to-Face - Dietmar does not advocate slapping the newspaper’s brand over conferences, but instead working to create meetings and encounters that get the newspaper involved as a player within the community. One Danish newspaper, for example, has started creating face-to-face meetings between adversarial parties. The parties are placed in a locked room with two newspaper editors for 24 hours in order to solve the problem. (I see a problem when a newspaper gets involved in finding a solution: How can they report on it independently?)
Smell - While nothing has been developed for smell to work as a channel for newpapers, Dietmar suggest that even smell could open up one day. Smellevision anyone?
More details on the video:
Angela Mackay on ftchinese.com reaching one million users
Angela Mackay, executive director of the Financial Times Asia Pacific, announced today that the Chinese-language ftchinese.com, which was launched in mid-2005, has now reached one million registered users. Users are not charged for using the website, but in the below video she hints at how the company plans to make money from the site.
Other things of note in her speech to IFRA’s Publish Asia conference in Macau:
* The average Financial Times subscription has lasted for 13 years. (Shows incredible loyalty and the importance of not alienating longtime readers)
* The FT cover price was raised twice in the last year, but circulation still increased.
* FT has an interesting take on whether to charge for site usage: Free up to 30 articles, then you must subscribe.
IFRAsearch - vertical search about newspaper industry
Reiner Mittelbach, CEO of the newspaper industry organization Ifra has been promoting Ifrasearch a recently launched vertical search for newspapers.
IFRA - motto: Empowering the news publishing industry - has created the search engine to allow newspaper-focussed people to look at trends, strategies and issues.
UPDATE: I just found another recently launched news industry vertical search engine called Mediageeks, put together by Howard Owens.
Hong Kong Standard claims free strategy brought victory over South China Morning Post
Six months after the 50 year old Hong Kong Standard moved from a paid to a free circulation model, the newspaper’s executive editor, Steve Shellum, told a conference that the strategy had brought a long awaited victory over the South China Morning Post.
“We had always been number 2 to SCMP in terms of circulation and ad revenue,” Shellum said, speaking to the IFRA Publish Asia conference in Macau today. “Our circulation is now more than double the SCMP and we have attracted a considerable number of new advertisers who pay an increased rate.”
The Standard, which recently adopted the motto “First past the post,” now claims a circulation of 250,000 copies per day, compared with 50,000 before going free.
“The decision to go free was forced on us,” Shellum said. “But it has worked very well indeed.”
Until the end of last year, all listed companies in Hong Kong were required to place official announcements in one Chinese and one English paper. This highly lucrative form of revenue came to a halt when the stock regulator allowed announcements online.
Under the new free model, which started on September 10, 2007, the Standard has not only faced numerous requests for further free distribution sites, but there has also been tremendous pressure from advertisers pushing to get into the paper, Shellum said.
“We would like to balance advertising and editorial at 50/50, but we’re not doing that due to the demand for ads,” Shellum said. “We have been running at lower than 40 percent editorial content.”
The solution has been to tighten stories and run more graphics and photos, Shellum said: “One picture is worth a thousand words.”
When the newspaper queried residential buildings about paper distribution points, the response was overwhelming.
“We had to raise the bar of apartment complexes to the more expensive ones,” Shellum said. “This is a good problem to have.”
Shellum said the majority of the Standard’s readers are Chinese, so the newspaper has introduced features to help readers improve their English.
“We want to produce a paper that people take home to the kids or wife,” Shellum said.
The Standard’s Chinese-language sister publication, Headline News, at 750,000 copies daily, claims the highest circulation of any free paper and is one of the many Hong Kong-based free publications raving about business. (More on that in a later post)
Free daily newspapers have been thriving in Hong Kong’s already crowded newspaper market. In addition to the dozen paid daily newspapers, there are four free daily newspapers serving the city, one in English and three in Chinese.
Liveblogging IFRA’s Publish Asia 2008 in Macau
Will be dropping by IFRA’s Publish Asia 2008 conference in Macau over the next couple days and will liveblog on merit. Anyone else headed there?
UPDATE: Further blogging on the conference by Mari Pascual who is posting to the IFRA Magazine Multiblog.
Link up:
My newspaper articles:
Random Faceroll
