News International’s experiment with a non-penetrable paywall around websites for The Times and Sunday Times has been a failure, while the rise of Mail Online has been the “world success story”, according to former Guardian leader, Tim Brooks. Read More »

A fascinating glimpse here at Fleet Street and how it produced newspapers during the Second World War. This film looks at how The Times was produced doing the blitz.

Britons, we are told right at the start, are inveterate newspaper readers as we dip into a world of plush looking smoky offices where the heart of the newspaper is the “intelligence department”. Read More »

A study looking at how newspaper companies are coping with the transition to digital found on average they were losing print ad dollars at a whopping seven times the rate that they were growing digital ad revenue.

Most papers it said are not putting significant effort into the new digital revenue categories and said that executives predict newsrooms will continue to shrink, with more papers closing while those that survive deliver a print edition only a few days a week — something that the Guardian’s Alan Rusbrigdger suggested last year. Read More »

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).