New ABCes figures on newspaper websites

The Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronics published their new rankings of newspaper websites for the month of June.

Obviously, the higher the number of website visitors, not to mention the amount of time they spend on the site, what they click through on and what features they use, will have an impact on online revenue through advertising.

The Daily Mail was first, with 29,373,379 unique users, an 83% boost on June last year. The Guardian was second with 28,966,942, with the Telegraph a bit further behind on 27,175,233.

The Independent, whose website is widely regarded as a big step down from its competitors, actually suffered a drop in unique users last month, at 9,352,369. However, it still gained a year-on-year rise.

These figures do not tell the whole story by no means - the differing business strategies mean that more users don't simply translate into higher web revenue: it will depend on many adverts, how much is being charged, how smart that advertising is and whether the websites are charging for any services.

University of Sheffield Journalism Students London Trip

As part of our degree, the Print, Web and Political Communication students went down to London for two nights, taking in the Telegraph, Parliament and, in our case, the Press Association.

I hadn’t been to London in a while, something I made as clear as possible to excuse my fairly poor geographic knowledge of the capital.

We (not the tutors) stayed at the ‘generator’ hostel, just off Russell Square. Publicized as ‘London’s biggest party hostel’, we seemed to be in the slighter older range of clientele. It was adequate – sure I’ve stayed in nicer places but it worked out for us. The eurotrash-esque bar/club was a bit much though. One of my friends took willingly to the dancefloor, only to return swiftly once he had replied ‘they are all about ten’. Nasty.

The Telegraph

Anyway, to the purpose of the trip – the media industry. On the Tuesday, we visited the Telegraph Media group offices and heard from a variety of their staff. Ed Rousell, who spoke in the guest lecture series at the University of Sheffield, talked about the Telegraph’s move to digital. He pointed out that the real shift has been in management time and focus, rather than monetary resources.

He also spoke about Twitterfall, which now takes pride of place on one of the large newsroom screens at the Telegraph. Remarkable that it has been developed by two 19-year-olds from the University of York.

Guy Ruddle, Head of Visuals, made another important point. There is perhaps sometimes too much of a focus, and needless to say we have seen it with the MSM and Twitter, on the tools used to deliver the news. I have posted before about the reaction of the media to the use of Twitter during the Mumbai attacks. But the tools used become the story – and although they are notable, they should not be dominant. Ruddle said: ‘we are not in the business of delivering text, video, interactive audio. We are in the business of storytelling. The only reason is to help people understand these stories as best they can.’
This is spot on – and more on this, and the use of video, later.

Parliament

On Wednesday, we went along to Parliament after a fairly early start. Had the tour, which I’d been on before but was fascinating all the same – still ceases to amaze me just how small the chambers are.

PMQs took place, but unfortunately, we only had so many tickets so didn’t get to see it in person. We did, though, go across to Portcullis House to watch it.

Managed to miss spying any big names, apart from Vince Cable who I managed to see – twice.

However, the main reason for going along was a series of talks, in committee room 20 if you’re interested, from politicians and media professionals.

Politician wise, we had two of the biggest characters in Westminster (and, more to the point, beyond): Lembit Opik and Ann Widecombe.

Above all, what I noticed was how smooth they both were: even under free questioning, there was no hesitation, no stuttering. I would guess this comes from decades of practice. Lembit Opik was as animated as could be expected, declaring that the relationship between the politics and the press was ‘schizophrenic’, and that the media ‘are too disrespectful to politicians.’ Although he pointed out the importance of building trustful relationships with politicians. However, his interpretation did seem to treat the relationship as a little one-way. I’m pleased that he feels there is a lack of good, investigative reporting in the media.

Ann Widecombe, when asked why she uses the media as she has done, pointed out that she can get the attention of 4 million on one of her TV shows – whereas if she made a speech in Parliament, she would be lucky if 40 people outside the building knew.

We also heard from Ric Bailey, who is the BBC’s Chief Political Adviser, who spoke about the DEC appeal controversy, Michael Savage who graduated from the Print course in 2007 and now works for the Independent political lobby staff and finally Nick Jones, a former BBC Political Correspondent.

Nick Jones brought up an analysis I hadn’t thought of before, namely the effect of online video on traditional broadcasting video. The fact that sensationalist video online is so popular, and that (such as in the case of The Sun and Alfie), papers will use video to cover and enhance stories, makes Jones think that, eventually, traditional broadcasting will also be influenced. Considering the regulations on broadcasting, this could have serious implications on the industry – will traditional broadcasting be less restrained and impartial, in order to compete with video online?

When we bear in mind that broadcast news and online video are delivered in such similar forms – News 24 is online, there is video-only news on the BBC, the mainstream media papers deliver video on most of their main stories now…etc. But I don’t see why bias online video could not exist alongside neutral, detailed broadcast news, in the same way that there is a demand for BBC and More4 News alongside Sky and ITV. Video is just another form of delivering the news.

Finally, we went along to the Press Association on Thursday. It was a fairly short visit but interesting to hear about their nationwide operation.

So, that was London. Managed to fit in Hyde Park and Tate Britain as well.

Related posts:
Media Convergence Week at University of Sheffield
Next term of a postgraduate degree at the University of Sheffield

Media Convergence Week at Sheffield University

• Ed Roussel, Telegraph on digital media
• Ben Hazell, Telegraph on search engine optimisation
• The Twitter debate!
• Audio/Broadcast training and more lectures
• How do you make money out of the web?
  

Convergence Week

Here on the print, web, broadcast and magazine courses at the University of Sheffield journalism department, we've just come to the end of 'convergence week'. Essentially, in line with broader trends in the media, each course has training in aspects of the media they are unfamiliar with - for web students, this meant broadcast training, for broadcast it meant web training and for print and magazine it meant both.

Why bother? Because virtually every media organisation now wants multi-skilled journalists happy working on all platforms. Although we learn many aspects of the media together, the four courses are by nature restricted to their own domain. If I'm honest, I don't know how much longer the department will be able to preserve such a structure, without also offering (or entirely replacing all the courses with) a postgraduate degree in multimedia journalism.

I'd imagine there are conflicting views at the end of convergence week, although those of us on the web course seem to have had a largely positive attitude towards it.

I've already done a post on Twitter, a debate started by Peter Cole in the first lecture on Monday. I seem to be finding new people on all the courses on it everyday now, as well as a flurry of new blogs.

Ed Roussel
On Tuesday, in our ordinary guest lecture slot we heard from Ed Roussel, the Telegraph's Digital Editor. The success of the Telegraph online is no secret, and it was a surprise to hear that despite the latter's obsession with it, the Telegraph gained more hits on Obama's inauguration day that the Guardian.

Ed pointed a quick picture of the media: NYT suffering a 60% drop in share price, the LA Times having 3 rounds of job cuts since July (though as I have written about already, their online revenue has reached a critical point) although the Telegraph has remained profitable for 2 years.

Due to their growth online, Ed feels that the reach of newspapers has, in fact, not diminished even though print circulation is down. In essence, the talk focused on what new business models the media could use to profit from journalism online - more on this later.

I asked Ed what role citizen journalism and user-generated content had to play in such new models, as I'd been surprised he hadn't spoken about it more. He replied that it was 'critical' that readers felt they were part of the process, and stated that his colleague Jeff Randall had become 'obsessed' with reading the comments on his pieces. Ed went on:

'Can you make money from it? Right now, no. But if you don't do it, you'll loose audience and therefore loose money.'

In response to another question, Ed stated that regional newspapers, which are still held in such high esteem by journalists (and journalism students) with a more traditional outlook, were 'firmly headed down the wrong path.' Their problem is, in fact, in the title - hyper-local is now more effective that 'regional'.

Search engine optimisation
Ben Hazell, also from the Telegraph, was a student on the web course last year. He gave us a talk about search engine optimisation (SEO), which has given me even more ideas about re-designing this blog and setting up my next one.
In response to a question about Google (I'm looking forward to reading Jeff Jarvis' 'What would Google do?' when it comes through the door), Ben replied that it is not providing facts, it provides information. At university, it's been banged into us for years to be sceptical about online sources of any sort. What's needed is a different attitude, and a better approach to how to find those sources, what to trust and how to check them.

Lectures and Training
As web students, we actually had a minimum of training this week compared to other courses. We had already done the video training so essentially underwent a re-fresh on the camcorders and Abode Premier. The audio training was quick, but comprehensive enough that I'm sure we'll cope.

During the lecture on online magazines, I realised a point about online revenue. Liz Nice asked who used RSS feeds for magazines, and I replied that I did so for the Economist but obviously didn't pay for any of this. However, this got me thinking. I'm not a fan of ad blockers, simply because if they become too prolific, advertising revenue for websites will reduce and may even cause some to shut down. But is using RSS feeds any different? A tiny minority of the feeds I receive also show the adverts from the website (Mark Halperin and Time's 'The Page' is one of them). Along with a total lack of familiarity with the sites themselves - because you have much less of a reason to look at them - this is just one of the downsides of RSS feeds.

One of our last lectures was on that of digital newspapers. Although this a potentially impressive venture, I can't see it taking off myself. It seems simply like a way to preserve a platform with technology, rather than looking at the wider process of news-gathering and how stories themselves are told. With people getting news and analysis, personally geared towards them from multiple sources on their computers and phones, it may be too late for digital newspapers to seriously compete.

So how do we make money out of the web?
For me, this has been the key and often-repeated question that remains unanswered by the end of this week. I don't believe in charging for content online if it can be at all avoided. Services however, can be charged for (such as pro accounts on Flickr, as Helia pointed out to me). Certain, specialist sections of a website can be used to pay for the rest - Ed Roussel told us the Telegraph's Fantasy Football generated 2% of their web traffic, but 20% of their web revenue.

Making money out of journalism online. There's no lack of people working on this issue, but it will require innovation, creativity and many failed ventures, and even then, there is unlikely to be one, simple, universal solution.

So we'll end with a quote from Jeff Jarvis:

'I realized lately that I’d been assuming we could see an orderly transition, Jan. 20-like, from old media to new. But it’s clear that we’re going to see destruction, voids, and vacuums in the transition.'