The New York Times is looking to part company with as many as 20 newsroom jobs and says it is looking for volunteers as it seeks to rebalance its “business for the digital age”.

The only people who need not apply are those working in the digital part of its business as a memo to staff says “newsroom employees who are covered under the union’s digital contract will not be eligible for the buyout.” Read More »

Australian futurist Ross Dawson has come up with these sobering graphics predicting the global extinction of newspapers in the coming decade. He is predicting the extinction of newspapers in the US around 2017 and in the UK by 2019.

Iceland’s papers will also go in 2019 with Canada and Norway in 2020. On a global level some of the factors leading to the (much written of) death of print include the rise in terms of availability of mobile phones, tablet computers and e-readers; the development of high performance digital paper; and the uptake of paid content and paywalls. Read More »

Great presentation from top designer Jacek Utko who looks at the relationship between newspapers and web design. He has set out the essentials for what he sees as creating world-class publications. It is his recipe for how print in general and newspapers in particular can save itself.

Flipping that around he gives his take on what websites need to do and how they can also learn from print. Read More »

Good news for anyone who’s seen their carefully-crafted words dismissed by some anonymous web poster as being ‘smug’, ‘pointless’, ‘unfunny’ or worse – one newspaper publisher is instituting a policy that readers must pay a fee to leave comments on its website. Read More »

For a few weeks now, News International have been causing a huge stink in the industry with Rupert Murdoch accusing search engines of stealing his content and threatening to stop his websites from being indexed (something he could do any time he wanted).

And now a senior figure from one of his closest UK rivals has chosen to focus his vitriol on Search Engine Optimisation and in the process managed to insult not just a crucial and growing element of the digital marketing industry but also internet users that search. In other words, almost anyone who uses the web. It all goes to show what a young industry we are all still in and how far so many major players in the offline world have to go before they really ‘get digital’.

Matt Kelly, Associate Editor for Mirror Group Newspapers, died of irony this week when he intensified the recent war of words between traditionally print based media owners trying to make a buck from the web and the search community, by calling on the news business to rely less on traffic from search engines and more on its “unique heritage and values” i.e. journalism. Unfortunately what Matt doesn’t realise is that the real problem is his own content and a lack of understanding that have lead him to hire SEO agencies that give us all a bad name.

In a World Editors Forum keynote in Hyderabad, he said, “In our great frantic headlong rush to accumulate users at any cost, many of us were all too quick to sacrifice anything that stood in the way of search engine optimisation … so three months ago, we launched two new websites … built on very different platforms designed especially to show each off in their best light. And the hell with SEO. We’re chasing passion, here, not page impressions.”

Matt also spoke of his previous experience with SEO consultants when working on other MGN sites, “We followed the brochure word for word, and we employed the same merry-go-round of SEO consultants to help us build sites that would ping to the top of search engines for a world hungry for our content. If little things like character, brand … the ingrained values that made the print product a success, got in the way, well … the ends justified the means. Content wasn’t king. Traffic was. Whoever, from wherever, reading whatever. It didn’t matter as long as the audience grew.”

Excuse me? They told you that content wasn’t king? Wow. Which search agency did you hire, Matt? Does it get worse?

“But it gets worse … In treating SEO as the be-all and end-all of online publishing, we devalued our content in the mind of the users. What a word: ‘users.’ Not readers, or viewers. Certainly not customers, not unless we are being deeply ironic. For the fact is the word ‘user’ is, for the vast majority of people consuming our products online, entirely accurate. We’d never choose such a sterile word to describe the people who buy our newspapers. But online, ‘users’ is about right … This was the audience we’ve been chasing all that time. A swarm of locusts.”

Excellent PR skills there, Matt. The people that visit your site from search are “locusts”? You won’t use sterile terminology to describe the customers of your print products but you are happy to describe those who come from search to your digital products (remembering that 80% all of internet journeys start with a search, so that’s going to be a huge proportion) as insects that have been known to decimate people’s lives? Charmed I’m sure.

What Matt, Rupert Murdoch and their ilk all fail to grasp is that there is no such thing as a poor user, only poor content. Is it really Google’s fault it drives people to MGN’s sites in droves and those people don’t find enough content that they can’t find elsewhere on the web and which is probably better? Does he not realise that people who visit digital media are known as ‘users’ rather than ‘readers’ because websites should be interactive and therefore is something you use? ‘Readers’ is too passive a term to be accurate.

I honestly don’t know where to begin with all of this. At LBi we have already addressed the poor usability and evidently deliberate “anti-optimisation” of MGN’s 3am.co.uk (as have others) and as for the other site he references, MirrorFootball.co.uk? Well, as a football fan, there’s certainly nothing unique about MGN’s effort. At least nothing, including the archive footage, that I personally would pay for.

SEO is 90% common sense. And content is vital. This is how you get the authoritative links that will boost your ranking. Be informative, funny, interesting, different, entertaining, even- possibly- controversial. BE AUTHORITATIVE. Make your website something that people will want to go to in order to find stuff that interests and/or entertains them. Yes there are poor SEO consultants out there, like the ones Matt has evidently chosen to hire, who may turn your website into a dull experience with bland content and who persuades you to optimise against terms like “music news” (who searches for that?) but ethical SEO consultants know that a site that is good for users is good for search engines. The site should be easily navigable, (a good start is not have URLs that are just as much gobbledygook to humans as to search spiders) and have loads of content that shows the user and the search spider that this is the place to find and interact with whatever it is you are searching for.

Matt’s real problem is that newspapers are old media designed for a mass audience, clumsily trying to make it in a digital world which is designed for the niche. They won’t all disappear completely but many will and those that remain will change radically. The newspapers sites that make it will be, like any website, the ones that have something unique that users won’t find anywhere else. And if you have something really unique and niche enough that you can charge for it then, as Google’s Josh Cohen said this week, “I would argue that if you are putting up a paywall, getting traffic and being discovered is even more important because you have got a smaller set of users who are potentially willing to pay. Discovery is just as important”. Even a mixed strategy of paid and free content may be the compromise solution, but once again, that content had better be unique.

It’s going to be a long hard lesson for the old media dinosaurs and a lot of established media institutions will make more big mistakes in their digital strategy before they learn that the brave new world of the web means that they have to now play by some very different rules.

The other day the always informative journalism blogger Malcolm Coles showed how UK newspapers were doing a bit of SEO by stuffing their web-pages full of Patrick Swayze results and tags.  This follows Malcom’s earlier analysis
that the Daily Mail had become the UK’s most popular online
newspaper….thanks to its coverage of Michael Jackson’s death (on
another note, check out how the Mail is copying right wing blogs in the US with its Obama coverage).

On from the launch of the relatively impressive if not entirely unique Mirror Football website earlier this month, recently launched is the digital version of the “famous” 3am Girls - Trinity Mirror’s latest attempt at a vertical for which they possibly hope to charge in the foreseeable future in order to help stave off the UK’s largest newspaper publisher’s plummeting share price avoid laying off more journalists and closing down more newspapers: http://www.3am.co.uk/.

What can we say about the SEO of this site by looking at it for 2 minutes? The URL structure looks ok, they seem to have a hierarchical system that uses hyphen to separate words. But I can’t say the actual words they want Google to spider are too impressive. I am not sure what they will make of “Ooh”, “Gasp!” and “Phwaor!” as the links on the main navigation. All the page titles are the same as well and there is no RSS feed, but I don’t want to be too picky. Does it have any meta data then? What are those CTRs going to be like?

Let’s Google [3am] … here they are down at number 6. Well, I don’t know about you but to me the snippet’s not exactly an incentive to learn more. But we all know newspaper companies hate Google so maybe they’re not interested in traffic from search engines, which might start 80% of internet journeys but let’s not let facts get in the way of the truth.

Oh but hold on. Trinity are paying for PPC rankings for both [3am] and [celebrity gossip] so they are at least acknowledging that search exists in some form. Oh dear.

To be fair, it is early days for this site. With a decent amount of marketing more people will come and visit what is an established brand in the celebrity world and as a result the site will attract some high quality links that will push it up the rankings to a point, despite Trinity making it as hard as possible for Google to understand what the site is about. But if they want to rank for [celebrity] (450,000 exact match searches on average per month) or [celebrity gossip] (368,000 exact match searches on average per month), which I am pretty sure they do as they are bidding on PPC for both, and compete with Heat, Perez Hilton, Spike and *whisper it* The Sun then they had better smarten up their act. Because currently they are, sensibly, not charging for content so all cash will come from ad revenue which is reliant on traffic and impressions and as far as Google, the biggest traffic driver of them all, is concerned they are merely a blip on the horizon.

Rupert Murdoch seems to think that you will.

After the huge financial losses just announced by News Corp, Murdoch has decreed that, possibly from as soon as next year, he will charge for all his newspaper websites including The Times and The Sun. It isn’t clear whether this will extend to broadcast news websites such as Sky News.

It has been obvious for some time that the newspaper industry is at a crossroads. The old-new-model of drawing in as much traffic as possible to gain revenue from display advertising has been found to be unsustainable – I say old-new because, well, we’ve been here before haven’t we: back when paid for content was deemed to be a broken model and the pay-walls tumbled down the first time. In addition to News Corp, the Telegraph, Guardian and Mirror Groups have all mooted charging for content but as Michael Beecroft, head of digital trading at Mediaedge:cia Global, concedes: “In many ways the horse has already bolted, and trying to close the door on it now will be very tricky indeed.”

This model may work for some specialist content, such as the FT or the Media section of The Guardian, but in general why would anyone pay for content they can get for free elsewhere?

Murdoch, Sly Bailey and others speak about how quality journalism is not cheap but what exacly denotes “quality” and who is the judge of that other than the audience? In a world where the media landscape is increasingly fragmenting, why would you pay for frontline heavyweight news items when the BBC continue to provide that for (what is perceived to be) free? And when it comes to the so called celebrity ‘news’ that the tabloids pedal so well, why would you pay for The Sun when you can go to Perez Hilton? Why go to newspapers for sport news when you can go to Cricinfo, Football 365 or Planet Rugby?

Even most of the content from the Guardian’s Media section can also be found with a subscription to the NMA or Media Week.

Just last week, Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired said in an interview to German news website Spiegel:

“In the past, the media was a full-time job. But maybe the media is going to be a part time job. Maybe media won’t be a job at all, but will instead be a hobby. There is no law that says that industries have to remain at any given size. Once there were blacksmiths and there were steel workers, but things change. The question is not should journalists have jobs. The question is can people get the information they want, the way they want it? The marketplace will sort this out. If we continue to add value to the Internet we’ll find a way to make money. But not everything we do has to make money.”

The UK has always had more national newspapers than any other country, and the arrival of digital has just exacerbated the situation to the point where the market is unbearably crowded.

The Independent, with the lowest readership of any national, has been under threat for some time following huge losses, with the Daily Mail & General Trust rumoured to be interested in rescuing it. The failure for such a move to materialize to date probably says more about The Independent that anything else.

Moreover, The Observer, the oldest Sunday newspaper in the UK, published since 1791, is facing the threat of either closure by the Guardian Media Group or being re formatted into a weekly magazine following the same heavy losses suffered by the other papers (The Observor actually being one of the papers that is holding its weight better than others). I would find this extremely sad, no other Sunday paper quite caters for the same readership (though this may yet be its saving grace- Guardian Media Group is owned by a not-quite-for-profit organisation for a reason) but we all should come to the realization that in the next ten years a lot of household newspaper names will either change beyond recognition or disappear completely.

Ultimately we have been here before. People may be questioning the business model for free content but it is worth remembering that the model for paid content turned out to be just as unprofitable back at the turn of the decade.  The fundamental problem is that there is no longer a scarcity of content and without scarcity economics doesn’t really work. One thing is for sure though – in the words of Dylan, These Times They Are A-Changin’.