It’s emerged this week The Times newspaper is backtracking ever so slightly on its paywall policy. It really is ‘ever so slightly’, two sentences at a time. 

When The Times’ paywall shot up in May 2010 it was unique. Unique because it completely closed off all access to the site’s editorial content for non-subscribers. This contrasted harshly with other paywalls that allowed readers to view a select number of articles or at least read the headline and first paragraph, notably the FT but other trade and specialist titles too.

Now the News Corp owned paper has backtracked. Google, Bing and any other search engine’s crawlers will be able to grab the first two sentences the paper’s editorial articles and index them alongside freely accessible sites. The update should happen next month, says The Telegraph.

Paid Content rightly suggests this is an effort to market the paper to new customers, having reached over 130,000 paying subscribers since the paywall went up. Ignoring the “drive by traffic” has been at the heart of The Times’ strategy, and it’s nice to know the paper’s digital team are willing to reassess their position a few years in.

But what does this mean for PRs?

When the paywall first went up I had a few questions over the value of the paper for PRs, effectively weighing the worth of reaching a fledgling but well targeted audience with a wider, more causal readership. There were also questions of exclusive stories with a site paywalled up to the eyeballs, and generally how monitoring would be tougher for PRs.

The latest update means it is work revisiting these topics:

·         Exclusives: well it seems you can have your cake and eat it too. Or other clichés. From a PR perspective, The Times is much more appealing for an exclusive story with a few bricks knocked out of the paywall. Your story will now get to the national broadsheet readers who are arguably far more engaged than the legions of causal readers hitting guardian.co.uk and telegraph.co.uk everyday. If you’re looking after a brand whose name won’t grab attention in headlines, this is even more appealing.

·         Monitoring: this will get a whole lot easier, especially for anyone scanning nationals for client and industry coverage to compile a morning news scan. If there’s a big story picked up by other nationals, I’ll bet my Gorkana log-in few PRs have included a Times article in news scans over the last two years. You’re just so much more likely to find it somewhere else first. Presumably the update means Times content will be included in Google Alerts too, but Paid Content confirmed monitoring services such as Meltwater are still off the cards. The downside is any client without a sub won’t be able to read the entire article in their scan, but at least The Times will be back on the radar. Which leads us to…

·         Influence vs exposure: this makes me wonder if Times writers have become less influential than their counterparts at other papers, whose stories are freely viewable by PRs, analysts, clients and…everyone. Does lack of exposure mean less influence? It’s not impossible, but if it’s the case the new paywall could reverse this process. Of course the majority of Times’ writers can be followed on Twitter, and the editorial team haven’t been hidden away in a cupboard since 2010. Some of them started a Tumblr.    

Last week the latest National Readership Survey (NRS) figures were released, detailing how many of us Joe publics pick up and read a newspaper or news online every day. Despite being one set of figures, different media outlets managed to report the news with different angles. And quite self-serving angles at that.

Take for example The Telegraph’s opening line “More people read The Telegraph online and in print every day than any other quality daily, new independent figures reveal”.

Seems quite straightforward, survey shows more people read The Telegraph than any other paper – if you discount non-quality types like The Sun. The paper backs this up by stating “The first study to combine print and web readership has found that 1,946,000 people read The Telegraph every day, compared to 1,346,000 for The Times”.

All sounds good, until you read The Guardian’s piece on the same survey results. “The Guardian had the biggest combined print and online monthly readership of British national quality titles in the year to the end of March, according to the latest National Readership Survey (NRS) figures.”

But that sounds like The Guardian is saying it is the most read quality paper. It’s report has figures too, “The Guardian and guardian.co.uk’s readerships combined gave an average monthly readership of 8.95 million in the 12-month period, ahead of the Daily Telegraph/Telegraph.co.uk audience of 8.82 million”.

Ah, there is it you see. The Telegraph is measuring on the largest number of daily readers, whereas The Guardian has gone for average monthly readers over a year. So it’s sort of comparing one day to one year…very sort of. I’m more inclined towards The Guardian’s stats, as measuring over the last year seems like a better indication of readership levels. In reality there’s no way to be certain which of these papers’ is the more widely read. The only thing we’re sure of it The Indy is well and truly in fourth place, lagging behind even The Times despite its full fat paywall.   

@simonhill

So Yahoo! has a new chief executive. Or another new chief executive if you prefer. The fifth inside a year is Marissa Mayer who, you may have heard, an ex-Google employee – as of Monday.

Can Mayer breathe new life into Yahoo!’s increasingly bleak future? To be blunt with you, I have no idea. I guess if there is a person in the world who could do it, it would be one of the three people who invented Google AdWords (yeah, she’s one of those). On the other hand, you can’t polish a…failing dot.com darling.

Forget the arguments on Yahoo!’s future for a second, because there’s an interesting point on media coverage of this appointment to end all appointments. After an initial storm of news stories late Monday / early Tuesday, a few ‘think pieces’ have been appeared with the more considered viewpoints of tech writers.

Specifically, The Guardian and The Telegraph took opposing views on the appointment and Mayer’s future.  

The Guardian was full of chipper enthusiasm, calling Mayer “a Savvy boss” who is “one of the few executives able to turn Yahoo around”. Much of the write up focus on her past, with quotes from former colleagues and details of her working practises. At Google she went to 70 meetings a week, don’t you know. Even Schmidty waxed lyrical about her – to Glamour magazine of all things.

Comparatively, The Telegraph took a more forward looking view – and quite a dim one at that. Digital Media Editor Emma Barnett reports Mayer has “has taken on mission impossible” and deduces her “relatively easy” choice to depart Google was due to being pushed out of the power circle that, The Guardian would have you believe, loved her to pieces. The article also chronicles Yahoo!’s poor record on pretty much every business decision since 1999, concluding “Mayer, despite her huge following in Silicon Valley and brilliant reputation in consumer technology, has just gleefully accepted one of the Internet’s most high profile poisoned chalices.”

The poisoned chalice lined is also replicated in a second Telegraph article by media, telecoms and tech editor by Katherine Rushton. A strange term to use, given that even a poisoned chalice is meant to at least appear to be good at first – not something many would call Yahoo! right now.

So the media is uncertain of her future, and Yahoo!’s for that matter. If nothing else, in a few months we can all discuss [the brilliant job she has done turning the company around / who on earth is brave enough to be chief exec number 6] – delete as appropriate.

@simonhill

Spotting the online version of print coverage just got a whole lot easier with a new app from Kooaba. The Swiss firm has updated the existing Paperboy app, which allows users to snap a picture of a print article in a newspaper or magazine and use image recognition technology to search and pull up the online equivalent.

Until now, the app had been limited to some 85 titles from Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Today’s update expands this to hundreds of titles, including big names such as The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, USA Today, The New York Times and Halifax Courier. Okay, that last one might not be huge, but you get the idea - there’s a lot of titles.

A full list can be seen here.

The app works by linking with NewsPaperDirect and PressDisplay to index online content against published print articles, negating the need for your average QR code. Tom Desmet, Kooaba’s Marketing Manager, told The Next Web, “It’s automatically available for all newspapers that are connected with NewsPaperDirect, and our direct clients. Automatically every day, every page, every article. No QR or anything else needed.”

Clever stuff.

For PRs, there’s a few implications. Sharing content with clients and colleagues just got a bit easier. Say you spot a piece in the paper while out of the office - you can snap a cheeky pic and send the online version straight to your team in the office. Or you can opt to archive the online version to read later, if you’re too busy to go through it right away. One slightly naughty element is the chance to take a sneaky shot of a headline article or two in you local news agents on your way to work, and save those precious pennies.

Which leads to another point - paywalls. While there are hundreds of titles available through Paperboy, The Times and The Financial Times are absent from the otherwise extensive list of national papers. Doubtless this is due to the paywalls currently in place around both publications’ websites, making indexing online articles against print relatively impossible for Kooaba. So there are some restrictions on the breadth of publications that will be part of the app.

Kooaba’s business model is quite straightforward, using what the company calls a ‘social paywall’. While an article is free to view by the app user and anyone the article is shared with, viewing further articles on the same publication will be charged. It’s not a proven model, but should it prove popular, more and more titles could start appearing in Paperboy’s digital satchel. 

Rupert Murdoch’s iPad-only newspaper, which launched back in February, has been quietly released to UK readers. According to The Guardian, although there was no official launch date it seems to have been available for over a week.

And it’s been getting mixed reviews - mainly because of the lack of localised content. The paper still contains US-based stories, including reports on US politics, current affairs and a two-week trial offer from Verizon Wireless - a business that does not have a UK consumer offering.

Ads are also US-centric, advertising Fox TV shows and a 4G smartphone. Anyone notice our Gs only go up to three?

It seems a strange tactic to try and woo a new perspective audience, especially from a media mogul with so much experience. So strange in fact, you have to wonder if this is really an actual launch or simply testing the water for something more tailored to the UK. The Wall Street Journal doesn’t just slap ‘Europe’ on the end of its header and hope for the best - so why is The Daily any different?

While other newspaper’s are working hard to generate revenue from mobile apps and paywalls, The Independent’s sister title ‘i’ has taken a different tact. From the 23rd June, readers will be able to access the paper’s content on their mobile, tablet or laptop, without paying the 20p print cost, through a new ‘app’ of sorts.

The initiative is a part of a sponsorship deal with beer brand Heineken, and comes with a few catches:

• You have to be in one of the selected pubs running the promotion, which limits you to water holes in either London or Cardiff
• You have to log-on to your chosen pub’s Wifi to access the paper’s content online
• You have to wait until 11am, presumably timed to favour the pubs, to read your paper. Of course, if you’re wanting to be in a pub before 11am you probably have bigger problems than online access to national news.

It’s an interesting idea and on paper (boom boom!) makes sense. A pub is one of the places you’re likely to read a ‘digest’ style paper, which is aimed at “readers and lapsed readers” of all ages. Presumably someone figured that means pub-goers who might fancy a pint of middle market Dutch beer while browsing the day’s events.

However, it seems unlikely this will be a big winner for the i. Carlsberg don’t do online newspaper promotions…maybe Heineken shouldn’t either.

If there’s one sector that’s paying good attention to the rise and rise of the tablet (that is PC, not prescribed pills of course), it’s journalism. The efforts to bring traditional media outlets to a screen 7-10 inches across is raising a few new questions for the PR world. How do these ‘tablet editions’ stack up to web and print publications? How much reach do they have? Are readers more engaged? Who has the best one?

At least one of these questions has had a hint of an answer from TigerStrike, a media and mobile consultancy, this week. According to a recent survey of tablet reader, the consultancy found average engagement time with an app based publication is between 30-40 minutes – with the average app getting five times as many page views as its web counterpart.

If true, or even partly true, this makes the editorial space in each tablet edition very precious for PRs. More engaged readers means your audience is far more primed for influence from the beautifully crafted news stories that flow fluidly from press releases (don’t raise that eyebrow, it’s been known to happen).

Of course, the flip side is somewhere behind each of these encouraging news stories and surveys is a PR working for the Telegraph Media Group, Economist etc, who wants their company’s digital genius to be recognised as the groundbreaking app. So take it all with this a PR’s portion of salt – at least during these early rounds.  

Tom Rosenstiel, the director of the Pew Research Centre’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, penned an interesting piece on The Washington Post website last week. He explores the five ‘myths’ surrounding the future of journalism. Here’s an abridged version, courtesy of Roy Greenslade from The Guardian:   

1. The traditional news media are losing their audience

No. Mainstream media organisations have not lost their readers and viewers despite people migrating online. Of the 25 most popular US news websites, all but two are “legacy” media sources, such as the New York Times or CNN, or the aggregators of traditional media, such as Google or Yahoo.

So the crisis facing traditional media is not about audience, but about revenue.

2. Online news will be fine as soon as the advertising revenue catches up

Such hopes are misplaced. In 2010, US web advertising surpassed print advertising, reaching $26bn. But only a small fraction of that, perhaps less than a fifth, went to news organisations.

The US newspaper industry took in $22.8bn last year in print ad revenue but only $3bn in web-based revenue.

3. Content will always be king

Not really. The key to media in the 21st century may be who has the most knowledge of audience behaviour, not who produces the most popular content.

Understanding what sites people visit, what content they view, what products they buy and even their geographic coordinates will allow advertisers to better target individual consumers. And more of that knowledge will reside with technology companies rather than with content producers.

4. Newspapers around the world are on the decline

Print circulation worldwide was up more than 5% in the past five years, and the number of papers is growing. Print media are thriving in the developing world and suffering in rich nations.

The forces tied to a thriving print newspaper industry include growing literacy, expanding population, economic development and low broadband penetration.

In India, for example, the population is growing and becoming more literate, but a substantial portion is not yet online.

5. The solution is to focus on local news

Well, the problem with “hyperlocal” content is its limited appeal. No mass market, too few advertisers, too little income.

How to produce local content remains a mystery. Can you put paywalls around it? Can you build a “pro-am” model, in which professional journalists work with low-paid amateurs to produce a comprehensive report?

So far, no one has really cracked the code for producing profitable local news online.

Source

Ah regional newspapers. Once the power-houses of local news across the UK, the many expresses, echos, stars, mails and gazettes have, like so many others, suffered ever lower circulation figures as readers increasingly turn to the world wide web for their fix on local news.

You’d think in the world of ‘free media’ readers would be reluctant to handover cash to access a local paper’s website - say from behind a paywall. So it was a little surprising to see the UK’s largest circulation regional, the Express & Star, erecting a paywall following a preview last month.

The Express & Star 24 site costs £2.81 for web and mobile access, and offers a range of local news, weather, traffic, football analysis and a digital version of the offline paper - pretty much all you’d expect from a local paper.

However, the price is a bit of a sneaky point. As Paid Content points out, as VAT is not added to print paper costs, the cost of a digital and print bundle is actually cheaper (£2.34 per week). This basically means the digital bundle comes in at the same price as the Monday-Saturday print edition.

This ensures the paper can use its digital presence to keep print readers up, keeping the audience loyal and steadying the subscription revenue stream. Quite a shrewd move.

Last week Forrester published the results of a survey that make troubling reading for those interested in the struggles of mainstream media in the digital age. The survey found an ever-so slightly increasing number of European consumers are willing to pay for digital content. However, the number willing to pay for news remained stagnant at 13%, while the number of consumers actually parting with cash decreased from 4% to 3% between 2009 and 2010 (see chart below).


Source: PaidContentUK

Whilst a 1% decrease isn’t exactly a fall from the cliffs one sees in Dover, it did lead analyst Nick Thomas to conclude “The paid content market, far from growing, is actually stagnating.”

The news publishing  industry is one of many struggling to grow demand for paid-for content. Thomas cites only the FT “along with some B2B publishers” as success stories in Europe. It’s worrying for PRs to boot. If no one is willing to pay for content, you have to start questioning the value a large chunk of the media has to your clients.

It’s not as if publishing isn’t trying to innovate, but there are lessons to be learnt from other sectors. The music industry has, for better and worse, been ahead of most sectors in converting to digital. The Forrester figures show ‘music’ is the largest potential growth market, with a 5% increase in the number of Europeans willing to splash their pounds and euros on the latest tracks. Digital music sales matched physical in the US, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), in 2010, and increased by a fifth in the UK.

Although the Forrester stats indicate a decline in those currently paying for digital music, the increase in those willing to pay for music in future could indicate consumers are putting stock in future offerings. Both Google and Amazon are rumoured to be launching ‘digital locker’ style cloud services. Such rumours may be surreptitiously helping the music industry ensure its digital future - if not helping right now.

The popularity of Flipboard shows innovation can grab the attention of consumers beyond music. As useful as porting content to mobiles and fancy apps may be, news publishers should be pushing harder still in order to grow their digital audience.