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Content Conference 2001
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| Session Report: Rob Cox: Outside the world of internet porn, content subscriptions are rarely a recipe for success. As a rule, you have to be serving unique, valuable material for people able to pay dearly—or, better yet, have their companies pay dearly. So when a group of UK-based financial journalists decided to launch an online venture, they targeted the banks, hedge funds and brokers of London's City financial district. But the team behind Breakingviews.com avoided going head-to-head with behemoths such as Reuters and Bloomberg. "We decided not to do news," explains Rob Cox, "Since the space seemed very crowded then." As its content model, the site used the back-page Lex column of the Financial Times, which had been edited for five years by Hugo Dixon before he left to help found Breakingviews. What the site offered was a pointed selection of short, punchy articles, always opinionated with a clear conclusion on a particular company. It began publication in April 2000, but the real test came in January 2001 when the site implemented its subscription model. At a special-offer price of £200, roughly 8 percent of its users signed on—quite a good result by industry standards. The move had always been planned, an advertising-portal model having seemed ill-advised after theStreet.co.uk spent $15 million only to go bust. At first money came gushing in, Cox recalled, but then it slowed to a trickle and the site's direct sales force needed time to come up to speed. Though that selling's a difficult process, Cox points out that breakingviews has the advantage of knowing the name, title and telephone number of virtually every potential client; all of them work at major financial institutions, since few private people will shell out the going price of £299. Yet even with such wealthy customers, says Cox, the burning issue for subscription content is piracy, a problem the site must constantly battle. "The most important thing for us with piracy is identifying it," he says. "Sometimes people don't even know they're using a pirated password, so when you send out an email telling them they're about to be shut off, they ask why. That's actually when we get some of our best sales." Michael O'Donnell:Throughout the online news industry, Salon's partial foray into a subscription-based model is being closely watched. Via a RealPlayer interview with George Shirk of Wired News, Salon's Michael O'Donnell explained that the site had considered a subscription model for several months and the advertising recession catalyzed the move. "At some point, online advertisement will be huge," he said. "But the timing is bad right now. We have what I'm calling the perfect storm: the internet bubble bursting, the economy softening and on top of that the changing worldviews after September 11." Asked whether moving to subscriptions was an act of desperation or exploration, O'Donnell said it was a little of each. Explaining his motivation for the early-mover strategy, he said: "Subscriptions are here to stay and at some point the users will have exhausted their personal subscription budget, so getting into the market early seems like a good strategy." In his opinion pure subscription models will only work when targeted to a very specific group of readers, willing to pay significantly for the content. So Salon's plan is to adopt a hybrid system with both advertising and subscription revenue, and market proprietary content, not breaking news, to the site's 4.5 million monthly unique readers. In other words, Salon felt people would pay for its writers' unique points of view or in-depth stories. The subscription is packaged almost as an affinity program, with the option of receiving Salon free of banners and pop-up ads. Content that might be unpopular for advertisers (e.g. hard news or outré columns) but very popular with readers are good candidates to become part of the premium service. So far only 23,000 readers have subscribed, O'Donnell reports. Still, subscriptions will generate 35 percent of revenue this year, up from 0 last year. The method of payment is a hotly debated subject. Some bundling of properties will happen, eliminating the burden of users needing to subscribe individually to different content sites. And Salon just completed a micropayments survey that showed users were very interested in monthly passes or pay-per-article models. Some of Salon's most fervent readers, however, still feel betrayed. "I get emails from users asking, 'I love Salon. Why are you changing to this subscription model?'" O'Donnell said. "We write back to every one of them explaining that they pay for content in other mediums, even if it's just a quarter for the paper, so why not for Salon? Sometimes they write back saying, 'Okay, I understand it's a new world now, so I've subscribed.'" |
| Resources: The Wall Street Journal looked at the "Pay-for-Content" world recently. Steve Yelvington commented strongly against newspapers online charging for their content. Read the quote here. Keeping track of the swing from 'Free to Fee'. |
The judges of the IPTOP award went through 15 news sites with a variety of perspectives and arguments, created on the spot, in the confrontation with the sites. The result is an evaluation of sites relative to each other - and to an ideal news site. The presentation will focus on the hot spots, on strengths and weaknesses, and will aim to identify issues to be acted on.
| Session Report: The IP Top Awards this year were judged by 29 experts in the field. Unusually for such competitions, they did not meet face-to-face to discuss the different entries. Rather, they each entered their subjective ratings and criteria in the nextexpertizer evaluation tool. Frank Schomburg, from the Bremen firm who created the nextexpertizer, first presented it, showing how the direct comparisons of pairs of news sites create distinguishing criterions relevant for the experts' rating process—each of the judges has his or her individual method of what characterises a top news site. As a first step the individual criteria were applied and captured in the evaluation tool that created aggregate models and produced a mathematical conclusion as well as qualitative data analysis. The result of this process is a visualization of this complex process, clearly showing how each website ranks among different dimensions. A closer analysis of different criteria entered for the winner of the award "Best European News Site," BBC News Online, showed how its site designer could analyse and possibly even improve the site. In conclusion, Schomburg offered his experience on how content quality has emerged as the most important category for the news sites. Additionally, interaction is an important factor, and though the meaning of "useful interaction" is debated, there is a general need for implementing interactive and multimedia features to exploit the internet's strengths. |
The stories, the strategies, the numbers. A cross section of content providers who looked around the next bend. From the vertical diversification to the cross media approach. At the base in every single case is a concentration on the quality of the content. But their combination of existing and new channels, the editorial approach and the business acumen are exceptional. Best practice meets next practice. Detailed description of each case will follow.
Abstract:
In this presentation, we will cover the internet strategy of New York Times Digital, the internet operation of The New York Times Co., and focus on its principal website, The New York Times on the web (www.nytimes.com). The presentation will cover:
-Introduction to New York Times Digital
-NYTimes.com mission & strategy
-Business model
-Key brand differentiators
Downloads:
Slide Presentation / 1392kB
| Session Report: When it comes to mission statements, NYTimes.com has set itself a high bar: To be as significant and prestigious in the digital world as The New York Times newspaper is in the analog world. Which means that its competitors are MSNBC and CNN.com, rather than the Wall Street Journal or Washington Post. The site's numbers are fairly staggering: In September 2001 it had 351 million page views, 10 million registered users and registered 750,000 new users. Its national and international impact already far outstrips the paper's, with 82 percent of readers coming from beyond the New York metro area, and 12 percent coming from outside the US. On the editorial side the site pushes the medium pretty hard, including multimedia packages using flash animation, audio, video and interactive graphics. "More and more, it's the photographers and reporters coming to us with ideas for packages," Meyer says, stating that these projects will be even more aggressively developed in 2002. The marketing and advertising innovations of the site is in some ways its most impressive aspect. Using a free-registration model, the site can do permission marketing for clients in extremely precise ways. Its customisable email newsletters drive traffic to the site, but also offer advertisers 2.5 million people who have opted-in to the program, made their general interests known and registered their user demographics. Innovation in terms of ad formats on the site also show some interesting possibilities: video ads captured straight from TV campaigns; sponsored pages with links to archival content; and the newest trick, launching next week, "Surround Sessions"—in which the user sees ads from only one advertiser during any single session (if the user quits the site before clicking through five pages, the advertiser pays nothing.) This creates stronger possibilities to drive perception for clients and has the major upside of allowing the site to use ad space in whatever section the user clicks into, not just media-buyer favorites such as travel. As for initial fears that the site would cannibalize the paper, they seem misplaced. The site has become the paper's greatest source of new subscribers: 100,000 paid subscriptions have come via the site in the last year, and that figure may rise sharply, since in September and October it recorded 20,000 print subscriptions through the site. As for the site itself going to a subscription model, Meyer said that's not happening, because the site would likely lose 90 percent of the audience. "The model is to keep the core news product free and upsell the best customers to premium services," Meyer explains. Among those premium services: the famous NY Times Crossword puzzle, which boasts a stunning 35,000 users paying $20 per year. Even more stunning: during the Q&A, Meyer revealed that after the price for the Crossword service doubled, its sales went up 140 percent. Another question dealt with whether premium pricing should accompany new offerings. "No, because people will only pay for things with demonstrated value," says Meyer. "It has to be something better than what they can get for free or something they can't get anywhere else." |
"Content? What content? What does that mean, for Christ's sake? I don't like that word. Content is not what we do, it's called journalism and that's all it is, journalism!". For Knut Ivar Skeid this journalism in the last few years has been practiced exclusively online. And it is has been localized, integrated, repositioned. This is the account of a eventful journey of a passionate content producer. Expect an additional - unexpected - speaker in this session.
Abstract:
www.nettavisen.no has a reach of one million norwegian readers per month, has existed for 5 years, and publishes close to 100 million page views per month. This internet only publication defined the direction of digital news publication in Norway, and a sister publication was established in Germany in november 2000 under the name www.netzeitung.de.
Downloads:
Presentation / 895kB
| Session Report: Nettavisen simply means "net paper" and its launch in 1996 stunned traditional Norwegian newspapers, who subsequently rushed online hoping to prevent Nettavisen from gaining too prominent a position. "Having the right people and the right timing [with the launch] changed the Norwegian Internet landscape, though we didn't understand it at the time," Skeid said. Today, 5 of the 10 biggest Internet sites in Norway are in the pure news market. Nettavisen ranks 5th overall in reach, but first in number of page views. The site reached profitability in the second part of 2000, but the dotcom crisis with its weaker advertising revenues—especially from travel, finance and software companies—will make that impossible this year. Norway is a global frontrunner when it comes to utilizing wired and unwired technology and has the second largest newspaper consumption in the world (pro capita). Most of the readership accesses Nettavisen online during business hours, and the curve flattens on the weekends. In counterpart, during the week there are approximately 7,000-8,000 page accesses by WAP, but on weekends WAP access almost doubles. Based on its Norwegian success, rollout into different markets was considered in January 2000. At that time the Swedish market was already too mature, so Germany was chosen to start the local product "Netzzeitung" (November 2000). It uses Nettavisen concepts and technology, but is edited in Berlin. Already today, Netzzeitung is the second largest news site in Germany after Spiegel with a reach of 570,000. The site consists of news, search and catalogues, mail applications and communities. The news section consists of business and finance reporting, sports and hard news. Increasingly, stories are being presented using new forms, such as a "cluster," where the main story builds as news develops, and related articles get added to the main story as they are published using links. The 43 employees employ a prime content management system to speedily publish around the clock and capitalize on big events – good or bad – which are major traffic drivers. Skeid has invested heavily in serious stories, though that strategy has certainly had its sour moments. "We sent one of our journalists on a tour to Asia with a foreign minister and got something like 50 or 60 clicks per article," he said. "But when you post some wire story about the newest size of Pamela Lee Anderson's breasts, you get 50,000 to 60,000 hits. After a while you start to wonder if it's worth investing money in good journalism." |
| Resources: Nettavvisen, who's Knut Ivar Skeid will speak earlier, has chosen the cooperation with a big portal for its marketing (in german) |
Rich Jaroslovsky, until this summer managing editor of the Wall Street Journal online and now back in the print operation, leads the efforts of the Online News Association. The latest project is a credibility study of journalism online. The presentation of the very fresh results combined with Rich's extensive experience will be an ideal entry point for the following panel.
Abstract:
Some highlights from the Online News Association's Digital Journalism Credibility Study.
Downloads:
Credibility study / 805kB
| Session Report: Speaking in his capacity as the president of the Online News Association, the Wall Street Journal’s Rich Jaroslovsky detailed the preliminary findings of the group’s new Digital Journalism Credibility Study (available in December at www.journalists.org). One goal of the study was to take stock of where online news sources stand now, both with the public and with the press. But more important perhaps was the idea of using the study’s findings to catalyze changes within the medium. "50 years ago the top TV news program was the ‘Camel Cavalcade of News,’ " pointed out Jaroslovsky. "It had a Camel cigarettes logo on the anchor desk and a promotional pitch read by the announcer halfway through the program. Now something like that would be unimaginable on TV. At the ONA, we’d like to compress the time involved in ethical standards evolving for online news, because credibility is the bedrock upon which the success of the medium is dependent. If people don’t find information online meaningful and credible, they will not pay for it." Some of the study’s most interesting results came from differences in perception between media workers and online consumers. In general, media workers are more concerned about credibility of online news than the public at large. Interestingly, the public rated cable TV news as the most credible source, followed closely by national newspapers, cable TV websites, and national network news. But media respondents rated news sources quite differently: national newspapers led with almost unanimous "credible" ratings, followed by the national newspapers’ website, while cable TV and its websites ranked far lower. Among general consumers the web was integrated into top, middle and bottom rankings based upon the credibility of the medium from which it originated, while the news professionals were more likely to rank website credibility in the lower half of all sources. In the long run, Jaroslovsky predicts online news will fold seamlessly into the news-medium mix. "In the early eighties when I was a White House correspondent, there was a huge debate in the press corps about whether CNN should be allowed to take part in news pools with the major networks," he recalled. "That seems ridiculous today, and 5 years from now it will seem ridiculous to wonder about the credibility of online news." |
| Resources: J.D. Lassica's excellent report on the Online Newspaper Associations Award talks about some preliminary results of the credibility study and cites a Bob Cathorn in top form on how the event of September 11 shapes the future of online news. |
Never in a crisis time before has the media industry had such a wide array of distribution and creation tools at its hands. The complexities of the multi channel environment, the various and very different formats, a pace of news development unprecedented all put the industry under extreme stress. How was this stress handled? What went wrong? What worked beyond imagination? This panel will explore the production issues, the editorial issues, the distribution issues and the reader feedback issues that made September 11 the most demanding news day ever
| Session Report: This panel focused on the events of September 11, the ways in which news sites responded and the ramifications going forward. For all the panelists, inventiveness was the order of the day. Just before evacuating the Wall Street newsroom, WSJ.com switched publication over to the Brussels bureau, later relieved by the Hong Kong bureau. Kalle Jungkvist of Aftonbladet stripped all graphics from the site within 30 seconds, a bandwidth-sparing tactic. Unable to reach his US correspondents, Jungkvist appealed to readers living in America to submit reports, generating 400 to 500 emails from all over the United States, many of them quite long and serious dispatches. Scott Meyer of NY Times Digital said his site faced particular problems because its central hosting facility's building was evacuated and the graphical servers had to be rebooted remotely over swamped phone lines. Thus, the site went into text-only mode for a couple of hours. But, capitalizing on its massive email-distribution lists, it sent out a straight news feed every few hours. As the day went on, the job took on greater editorial complexity. Aftonbladet, for instance, shut down discussion groups where vehemently anti-Muslim sentiments were voiced. Publishing news fast and the fear of spreading false rumors were competing imperatives; both Meyer and Blumencron recall having to rapidly retract postings. To deal with such problems, the Times developed a new section called "Latest Developments," where stories were clearly delineated as being unconfirmed wire reports. In the Q&A period, one audience member pointed out that TV actually had much greater immediacy, because it had not suffered from the bandwidth issues and because the video images had come across so much more viscerally on the big screen. But Jungkvist pointed out that the net's real strength is not visual: "The Internet is about depth, which became clear in the traffic patterns. It peaked during work hours, went down as everybody went home to watch TV in the evening, but then at night the traffic picked up again when people came looking for more in-depth information than what they found on TV." Rich Jaroslovsky seconded that line of thinking: "The event showed how the net fits people's information needs: more timely than newspaper, more in-depth than broadcast, more context than any other medium. The net should not try to be TV or print, but fill the large space between the two." To wrap up the session, Norbert Specker asked, What single thing changed most in online publishing due to the attacks? Meyer said the crisis situation had catalyzed changes in the site, forcing leaders to emerge and more resilient structures to form. Blumencron said it brought home the huge impact of information published on Spiegel Online, making him more vigilant about what gets posted. For Aftonbladet, the lesson was that the site doesn't have the resources to itself generate so much material in a crisis, and thus has started working more closely with its sister newspaper. Taking a wider perspective, Jaroslovsky said the events and the coverage provided by sites served as proof that "online news is no longer a project, a novelty, or an experiment. It showed we have a place in the news landscape." |
| Resources: Many resources have been built in the wake of September 11. Via Steve Yelvingtons Online speed boost checklist you'll find many articles covering the coverage. If you have not checked out the Screenshot collection yet, do so to see how the online world looked like that day and also for further pointers like this article on the Media Guardian When the Web came of age (how net editors coped) . |
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