Simply Zesty » Traditional Media – Simply Zesty

The cost of online content; an overview of paid news subscriptions

Quinton O'Reilly — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 14:35:43 +0000

With the cost of print media beginning to exceed revenue received, traditional outlets are slowly making their way onto an online platform to explore new ways of generating revenue and in some cases, curb the losses that they’re experiencing.

Last month, The Guardian announced that they would become a digital first service, placing more focus on newer mediums with their print media containing more considered articles such as comment and features. This came after their publishers, Guardian News and Media, revealed that they were making a loss of £33m a year with their digital-first approach resulting in job losses. Other media outlets have experienced mixed fortunes over their transitions, trying to find the perfect model to generate revenue online while keeping their readership.

Today, The Financial Times (FT) announced that it has increased its adjusted operating profit went up by 3% to £31m. In a half-year report by the FT’s parent company, Pearson PLC, sales at the FT group increased from £192m in the first half of 2010 to £203m in the same period in 2011.

Digital subscriptions to FT.com rose by 34% to almost 230,000 registered users while registered users went up 49% to 3.7 million. Mobile devices now account for 22% of traffic for FT.com and more than 15% of new subscriptions for the site. Across print and online, the FT’s total paid circulation was more than 585,000 up 4% on 2010, reaching an average daily audience of 2.1 million. The premium subscription for the FT costs €38.99 per month or €389 for an annual subscription, which amounts to around €7 per week.

In a statement published on their website, Pearson stated that “the changes we have made to the business model and mix mean we are well placed to grow even in tough markets for print circulation and advertising. We expect digital subscriptions, now the engine of the FT Group’s growth, to continue to build steadily.” They reported that they had experienced “modest” advertising growing with strong performances in luxury and online areas but warned that advertising demand still remained “volatile”. The volatile playing field they mention is the very problem all print media outlets are facing and how best to tackle the problem is still unknown.

News Corp and the subscription paywall

The bigger experiments for traditional print media outlets to recoup losses are still underway; paying for online content is still at an experimental stage and has met resistance due to the majority of news outlets allowing readers to access for free. So far, a number of subscription services have been pioneered by News Corporation whose publications include The Times (UK), The New York Times and The Daily, an iPad exclusive newspaper with the results at best being mixed.

News Corp have yet to reveal subscription figures for The Daily but their number of subscribers are reported to be somewhere in the hundreds of thousands. The publication costs 99 cents to download it for a week, or $39.99 if you want a yearly subscription.

Reports say that the iPad newspaper has had around 800,000 downloads through iTunes in its first three months but it made a loss of $10m during this period also. News Corp defended this saying that the service is still a work in progress, suggesting that it’ll take time before any profits are seen.

The New York Times has started relying more on digital properties for advertising as it now accounts for more than a quarter of the media outlet’s total advertising revenue. It started charging non-print subscribers for access to most of its online content back in March. So far around 224,000 subscribers have signed up for the service alone.

However when the company combines other subscription that allow online access, mainly home delivery subscribers, those who subscribe through e-reader and digital readers who have free promotional access through a deal with Ford Motor Co., The New York Times has more than one million digital users.

Comparison of subscription prices between the New York Times and other media subscription outlets

Non-print subscribers pay between $15 and $35 a month for unlimited access to the paper’s online content. Through the first half of 2011, digital advertising accounted for 28% of its total advertising revenue, rising 3.5% from the first half of 2010 to $168.2 million

However The New York Times still reported a $119.7 million second quarter loss, with overall advertising revenue falling by 4% although they say that the digital subscription model is a long-term strategy and that it will provide a new place to earn revenue during the second half of the year.

Earlier this month, The Times (UK) was reported to have over 100,000 people signed up to its online services which includes its website, iPad and kindle products. This was a 28% increase from figures in February where their subscribers amounted to 79,000. The Times and Sunday Times charges £1 per day or £2 a week to view its online content.

Outside News Corp, one such paper considering the pros and cons of adapting a paid model is The Washington Post. The paper is currently free to access online but the company are considering the feasibility of implementing a pay subscription model to curb losses. Back in February, they announced that 43% of their revenue in 2010 was generated online yet that was in line with falling revenue usually generated from print sales.

Comparison between online and print revenue received for the Washington Post up to 2010

In the first quarter of 2011, print advertising revenue had fallen by 8% to $63.2m while online publishing revenue rose by 8% to $25.7m. Dispite online revenue rising, the losses received from print adverts and the gains made from online will match each other sometime in the future.

While it’s not encouraging news for those making the transition from print to online, some sites have experienced success without external help. BBC.com had announced two weeks ago that they made a profit as a standalone business, two years ahead of what they had originally forecast. Many sites will want to recreate that success but how they generate a profit for themselvse while pleasing their readership is anyone’s guess.

Condé Nast bridge the gap between bloggers and publishers

Lauren Fisher — Sat, 23 Jul 2011 13:00:28 +0000

An interesting new project by Condé Nast aims to unite bloggers and traditional media even more, through a joint publishing effort. The venture is being launched through Condé Nast’s magazine – Lucky – which is already being printed and available online. The magazine is going to be working with over 50 fashion and lifestyle bloggers who will be contributing content to the magazine, but crucially will also be business partners for the magazine, as a brand new business model is revealed. There’s currently a lot of debate around how blogs can be monetised, and whether this can be done through more traditional methods such as advertising, or whether monetisation will come through new, indirect means, such as being employed as a journalists on a traditional newspaper, The project by Lucky Magazine shows that the answer might be more in the latter.

Not just paid for content

Rather than just being paid for contributing content and articles to Lucky magazine, the bloggers are more business partners, with specific details being released by the publisher. Advertising opportunities will be made available both through the print magazine and the online version at Luckymag.com Revenue generated here will be split 50/50 between the publisher and the bloggers taking part. In this respect, the bloggers are being paid as, and acting as, media platforms themselves, instead of being paid purely on a content production basis, or a price per word for example. This shows a new way of working between publishers and bloggers. Every publisher or blogger wants more content, and everyone wants to get paid. This shows a way of publishers and bloggers uniting to achieve both of these things simultaneously.

Of course, this type of model might cause consternation among some bloggers, who will question why they only get paid on the ad revenue generated, rather than the publisher paying them outright and upfront for the content that they’re producing. I think what Condé Nast are trying to do here however, is find a more equal platform, whereby rather than looking at a static payment model, the blogger can earn more based on the number of ad impressions served. I.e. the better your content, the more money you’re going to earn.

What about journalists?

The question remains of course, of just how journalists will react to this. Relationships between bloggers and journalists have always been lukewarm, to put it nicely. When newspapers are in trouble, staff are getting laid off and demands on journalists increase, quite how they’ll react to bloggers moving closer into their own turf remains to be seen. This project is particularly interesting because it’s carving out a completely new space for bloggers to sit, as opposed to placing them in directly the same roles as journalists. It also contributes to a more competitive environment, as journalists and bloggers compete to get the same scoop for the same publication, as opposed to looking for the best content for their own sites respectively.

What about brands?

The upshot of a project like this for brands of course, is that it provides a much more accessible platform for them to get in front of and right beside the most influential bloggers in their area. Revlon are one of the first advertisers to sign up to this platform and get in front of a whole new audience. If as a brand you’re not particularly active in building personal relationships with bloggers, it can be difficult to get coverage in this holy grail of the most influential bloggers. But here you have a more direct in through Condé Nast, to speak to, or advertise alongside, some of the most important bloggers in fashion and lifestyle. Here, the publisher almost becomes a gatekeeper for that relationship. This is perhaps one of the most attractive offerings a publisher can put forward to a brand – the chance to get in front of journalists and bloggers within the same platform, with a very different – and less risky – approach than traditional blogger outreach.

While this isn’t the first example we’ve seen of publishers working with bloggers (The Guardian introduced ‘beat bloggers’ to increase coverage of local events), it’s one of the most interesting in terms of how the partnership is proving mutually beneficial. This may well be the blueprint that is set for other publishers that want to work with bloggers and further adapt to social technologies. It’s well known that publishers have a big job to do to catch up with social media, make themselves relevant and still make money with the new form of content consumption. This is a good way of showing how social technologies can influence an entire business model, and it will be interesting to see how this pans out for both the publisher and the bloggers.

QR Codes And Print Media – Finger In The Dam?

Niall Harbison — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 19:39:36 +0000

I saw this newspaper ad this morning while waiting for my coffee. It was an advertisement by an estate agents who in fairness to them seemed to have pulled out every social media trick in the book to make their advert stand out from the rest and be interactive. It featured not only an actual Facebook like button but also a Facebook logo and the obligatory Twitter account but also a QR code that users could scan to get a more interactive view of the property in the advert. Now I’m not giving out about this ad in any way because at the end of the day it caught my eye and they are trying everything to make their advert cross platform and engage the end user in different ways.

What I am wondering is if the advertiser is trying so hard to find customers and spending huge money to take out a half page advert are there not smarter ways in which they could do it? I for example am looking to buy a house at the moment but I use a location aware App from Daft which has augmented reality features and lets you find houses nearby. Even if I see houses in ads like that one in the newspaper I’ll end up looking for them via the app.

QR Codes A Temporary Fix

QR codes are popping up all over the place and I can’t open a newspaper without seeing them on every page. Sure there are some brilliant ads like the one below but the worlds of print media and technology don’t mix in the long run. There is only a finite amount of interesting things you can do with QR codes and in the end I think publications would be better served looking at their own online strategy rather than trying to tread water in this area. Great as a short term interactive strategy but the long term picture of how their publications shift totally online should be the bigger concern.

How Curation Is Shaping The News You Consume

Niall Harbison — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 11:40:48 +0000

There is a lot of noise online at the moment and finding the good content is tough. We all have about 3 or 4 sites where we stop off for looking for news and entertainment every day but increasingly our media consumption is coming to us via curated sources like our own personal networks. This is a huge shift in the old model where “gatekeepers” dictated what content we consumed and how we accessed it across to a new model where curation plays a huge roll. Caught in the cross hairs are the old media institutions but as consumers we are winning because not only do we have access to larger amounts of content in real time but the smart people are curating it through a variety of sources to match their needs and doing so largely for free. So what role is curation playing and what are the implications for the media world at large?

Tastemakers

I recently tried to explain Twitter to a fairly media savvy young professional and was met by the usual “I don’t want to know what you had for breakfast” response. What I tried to explain was that without Twitter and without following opinion formers and building his network he was effectively missing all the best information and losing ground to others. No matter how smart you think you are there are people in their individual fields and areas of expertise who will share better information than you do and to not benefit from these tastemakers is to your detriment. The more time you invest in following the right people and building your own curated feed of tastemakers the better your end consumption of content will be and ultimately the smarter you will become.

Professional Curators

Often known as the “copy and paste media” for taking professional content that others produce at great cost and bringing it together in one place these sites are becoming increasingly popular. Scorned by old media but hugely popular in our new online world where people scan information on mobile devices and in tabbed browsers with all our attention spans shrinking these sites are springing up in all verticals. Anybody can build a small media empire from their bedroom (that is what Mashable has done in under 5 years ) with tiny overheads and the barriers to entry are shockingly low. In the past you needed printing presses and broadcast cameras which were out of reach for the man in the street but the man in the street now has Ustream, Twitter and can start his own empire on a free WordPress theme.

Crowd Curation

Interestingly one of the early beacons for crowd curation, social new site Digg, this week lost it’s founder and was effectively declared dead by many. Don’t let this fool you though because large portions of the content you consume online these days has been curated by the crowd. You’ll end up watching videos on Youtube because millions of others viewing has pushed them to the top. The best stories rise to the top of Google because they have the most links going to them and Retweets and Facebook likes are the crowd’s new way of curating news. As more people pour online and share more content the wisdom of the crowd will become more and more important and should not be underestimated.

Good Journalists Need To Be Paid

All of the above is great for finding content but if everybody is just sharing links and copying and pasting who is going to pay for the content at the source in order to pay the journalists and content producers? Putting people on the ground in Libya is not cheap and even though Youtube videos of downed jets are great to share that will only give me so much perspective. So far the revenue models around print media consist of either putting up pay walls or looking to locking down devices like the iPad in to paid models but I’m not sure either of those will work unless you have every media organization in the world on board. I’m not sure anybody in the industry knows the final answer to the revenue model but one thing is for sure and that is that we need one because without professional high quality content there is nothing to curate.

What Is The Future Of Curation?

At the moment it is a little too manual for my liking. Sure you can get a lot out of curating your own network but while I am willing to invest that sort of time myself to improve my knowledge many simply won’t. Nobody has really cracked algorithmically curating content although the likes of Facebook and Google are making some strides in the area. We certainly need some sort of editorial layer on top of all the vast quantities of social news content that is out there and hopefully more traditional media will jump in to that space because they are the most skilled to take on the role. Finding the revenue in curation is the tricky part though. The big sales of blogs like Techcrunch and The Huffington Post have been based on future revenues and are very much a punt by AOL. At some stage I’m pretty sure we will have professional individual curators and whole teams of curators whose sole job is to bring us the best content (like the Irish based Storyful). Would love to hear some opinion on this from people within the various industries involved, what do you think the future of curation is?

Why Traditional Media And Print Industry Are Dying And 5 Things That Could Save Them

Niall Harbison — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 10:32:17 +0000

Is traditonal media dead?

Traditional print media has been taking a bit of a hammering now for the past couple of years. Circulations are way down and advertisers are taking the dollars elsewhere to getting better return on their money and to engage consumers in more interactive ways. Just last year newspaper circulations were down 30%, a huge amount for such an important industry that has helped to shape opinion and influence millions of us over the years. We look at a combination of the factors that have caused this decline and see if we can find any short term solutions for an industry that is on it’s knees at the moment. The biggest problem is that producing quality news costs money, professionally trained journalists and the infrastructure that they need to help them report are all costly and in order to be supported and for the medium to continue the industry needs to find additional revenue models outside of advertising and find them very fast. Here are some of the reasons why the print industry is struggling followed by some of the possible ways it might get out of the mess…

Challenges Facing The Print Industry

The Challenges facing this industry range from changes in the way we lead our lives to the technology that we use and have adopted over the last few years with the pace of change accelerating…

Changing Lifestyles

Most of us lead lives that are incredibly busy and we have very little time to spend sitting down to read a newspaper any more. Our work hours are spent glued to a computer completing tasks and even commutes and breaks have now been filled with smart phones like iPhones and Blackberries that mean we are always connected to the office. The couple of hours that we do have off in the evening are spent looking after children, washing clothes, socializing and doing all the other menial jobs that require our attention. As our lives have become busier we have been forced to digest our news in smaller bite sized pieces mostly online leaving little time to sit down with the newspaper.

Technology

This is the obvious one and the main contributing factor to less and less newspapers and magazines being consumed and combined with the reason above is the main factor in circulations being slashed in recent years. Since the introduction of broadband, smart phones and news content on demand our appetite for newspapers has shrunk dramatically. The smart newspapers are online and provide better content than they do offline supplementing it with things like online video and other rich media content that would be impossible in the offline world. Too many articles end up being used as fish and chips wrapping instead of being online forever and generating cash from ads in the long term while remaining searchable content.

Better Advertising Elsewhere

It’s not just that other platforms have emerged to attract the eyeballs of consumers but better advertising has also emerged on these platforms to help engage consumers in a way that newspapers and magazines never could have. As consumers have been bombarded with advertising we have become more attuned at filtering it out ourselves so half page spreads in newspapers are not what they used to be and just can’t compete with the ROI on more innovative and engaging forms of advertising that are being developed online at the moment.

5 Possible Solutions

Many smarter people than me have been trying to find solutions for the last few years to increase revenues and breath life back in to this flagging industry but to a large extent they have failed up until now. Nobody knows if there will be one definite solution, many smaller revenue models or even the unthinkable…no long term revenue model…

Apple Tablet

This mythical device has been talked about for the last year and should finally arrive with us in less than 10 days. Apple are famous for revolutionizing whole industries and the chances are they might try to do what they did to the music and telephone industries with print media. The tablet is rumored to be a large screen that would be ideal for viewing magazines and newspapers possibly in an entirely new format online. Consumers have been used to getting content for free online for a long time and that model will be very hard to change but if anybody can do it Apple might just be the company that could convince us that paying for nicely presented content would be the way forward. Newspaper apps have already seen some success in the iPhone app store with The Guardian App seeing 70,000 downloads in it’s first week so there is already a small amount of traction in this market and the bigger screen and new features will certainly help. The initial problem will be that Apple’s market share will be tiny because of the price but if they can nail the model many other manufacturers will copy and it could just be the golden ticket traditional media needs to get it out of jail.

Micro Payments

This is one area that is under development at the moment. Many newspapers either currently have or have at least played with subscription models in the last 5 years but to a large extent putting all of your content behind a paid wall has not worked for them. The idea of a micro payment is that you would thanks to technology be able to leave a small payment (lets say 10 cents per article) on individual stories that need payment to unlock them. The majority of content that publications produce would still be free but the quality stuff from pad journalists would require small payments with the logic being that people would have no problem spending small amounts to access content. The platforms might also change with the content sitting on other sites such as Facebook with the micro payments coming through one central account. This model would work especially well with video or other rich media content.

Focusing On The Local

One area where I see massive growth is local media as we all lose our sense of community due to our busier lives and the rise of local listing services and content that is hyper local in focus. We are seeing services like Google, Twitter and Foursquare focus in on the local markets as they target the advertising dollars of smaller businesses hoping to attract customers and newspapers and publications should be looking at supporting those business models with content focused on local markets. The smaller publications are never going to be able to compete with their larger rivals for advertising models and the fact that they can focus on local content might just be to their advantage.

Embracing The Community

You only have to look at some of the success The Telegraph have had using social media (% of their traffic already comes from social media sources) and the publications that tap in to citizen journalism have a huge advantage. At the moment news stories that break on social media sites like Twitter can have a messy feel to them with traditional media usually needed to add some verification and comment to the stories. We may see a newspaper or publication move in to this vacuum where news is sourced the community (think flip cams, twitter etc) and brought together in one central place with insight and validation being added in one central portal. Getting the community involved could be the making of newspapers but finding the right revenue model and way of integrating that content will be the challenge.

Back Murdoch In The Search Engine Battle

For those of you living under a stone for the last 6 months Rupert Murdoch has been jostling with Google about blocking all of his content (he pretty much runs large parts of the media in UK and USA). The motive behind these actions is of course to try and force Google’s hand and possibly get Bing involved so as he can make additional revenues from his content. It really is not clear where this battle is headed but one thing for certain is that Murdoch is one of the smartest media operators in the world and the battle over revenue models for the entire industry lies very firmly on his shoulders. This battle has a way to run but it’s outcome will shape the print media industry for many years to come. Watch this facinating interview with Murdoch (on one of his own channels obviously) for some insights in to his thoughts…

Is Your Website Set Up To Benefit From Traffic Spikes?

Niall Harbison — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 13:20:42 +0000

In the the last 3 years I have been lucky enough to get some decent mainstream media coverage including appearing on the Dragons’ Den UK for Lookandtaste, getting covered in Techcrunch here, making the homepage of Digg, getting stumbled plenty of times and appearing in the LA Times and every single time the traffic graph looks similar to the one below. At the time it can seem like one of the most exciting things to ever happen when you are looking at dizzying traffic numbers that are 100 times what you would get on an average day but what long term effect does this have? Are any of the visitors that come to your site going to hang around? Are they going to come back week after week and become regular readers or even customers of yours? The answer for the most part is a resounding no. People stop by for a nosy on your site but chances are they will never be back. Unless you have some simple ways of capturing a percentage of them like we have explained here…

Average Traffic Spike Graph

This is the graph from when this site got covered recently on Techcrunch. As you will see there is a massive spike when the article first appears followed by a couple of smaller spikes when other sites pick it up and create a knock on traffic effect from the coverage. From my experience a spike in traffic will always look like this…

As you will see there is a massive spike where thousands of new readers stop by to look at the story but as is expected very few return. If you look very carefully at the graph though you will see that the baseline figure has increased significantly once the dramatic spike has passed. This is no accident and some of the reasons for this are explained below. To put this in context here is a traffic spike I experienced a couple of years ago when I was just caught up in the moment of the traffic and as you can see it just flat lines and goes back to where the original traffic was in the first place after a couple of weeks which is no good to anybody and is a massive wasted opportunity…

How To Benefit From Traffic Spikes

Everybody is going to get a traffic spike at some stage for their website no matter how small. Chances are you will write or photograph something that people find massively interesting and it will spread like wildfire over the internet. You’ll get caught up in the huge amount of traffic you are being sent and think it is the best thing that has ever happened to you but in truth it is just another 15 minutes of fame unless you have some triggers in place that can help you capitalize fully. The reason the baseline figure on the top graph is higher after the spike is because this blog has some key calls to action that help bring people into the network…

RSS

You need some sort of distinctive RSS symbol so as people can click on it and subscribe in an instant. This is the most powerful form of conversion as this is somebody who is effectively saying “I like what I see and I’d like to get an update every time you post something new”. An RSS reader is somebody who is not only going to read your content in the future but who could also possibly share and promote your content to others in their network in the future if it is good enough.

Phone numbers

This might not apply to everybody but there is a business behind this blog and at the end of the day we need to pay the rent by attracting clients. We wanted people to come on to our site and be in no doubt as to how they could get in touch with us. After the spike we received 3 calls directly from international clients looking for representation. The phone numbers are incredibly clear for all to see and include a mobile just in case it is outside office hours (which one call was).

Email

This is more of an in-direct traffic driver but the article and coverage generated over 50 emails from people asking us questions about what we do and general questions about the blog. All of those emails were answered immediately and personally. People respond to great customer service and a knowing that there is a real person behind a blog or website and several of those people who emailed are now dedicated readers of this blog which they may not be had they not emailed and started a conversation.

Facebook

We all know and trust Facebook. The widget on the right hand side of the page allows people to become our fan on Facebook with one click of a button. Many people do this and as we post all stories from the blog here to our Facebook Fan page they are continually drawn back to the blog thanks to the stories popping up in their Facebook stream. Having seen stories they like several times they are more likely to become regular readers and come to the blog on their own accord.

YouTube

We make lots of videos over on YouTube and want to show these off as much as possible and with a simple box on the right hand side of the page (opening in a new window so as not to take people away from your blog too early) we show the videos off and send people to our video page where they might just subscribe and become long term fans of our videos and get an update direct to their email every time we post a new video.

Possibly the most important call to action of the lot. We try to create something really special with our newsletter and for that reason it gets the most prominent position on the homepage and it converts really well into people signing up. Somebody who gets the newsletter (we make sure to make it easy to un-subscribe and make the content worthwhile) is engaged with you for as long as they stay subscribed and are turned from being a passer by in to a long term reader of your blog.

Retweet Button

This is a simple little button that you see at the top of every post. If the content is good enough you want people to share it with their followers on Twitter and by providing them with a simple one click solution to do this you are increasing the chances of even more people seeing your content and repeating all the steps that are laid out above.

Get Your House In Order

Everybody is going to get a traffic spike at some stage on their site and you need to be ready for it. Chances are that you won’t have the time to get all these things implemented in time so have them in place in order to get maximum benefit out of the traffic spike when it does come. Converting passers by in to long term engaged readers is the key and sadly your good content alone is not going to do that, you’ll need to capture people in the 60 odd seconds they are on your site and nudge them back there in the future. I wish I had known this sort of stuff when I had sites in the past as it really is crucial in building long term traffic and increasing your readers, fans and subscribers.

What has your experience been with traffic spikes? Did you get any long term gain out of them or have any better solutions than ours above?

10 Simple Ways To Get Media Coverage

Niall Harbison — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 13:48:58 +0000

Through a mixture of luck, bullshit and following a few good tips I have received over the last couple of years I have been lucky enough to get a large amount of press for the various projects I have been working on. Getting coverage can help you with everything from securing investment to increasing sales or creating valuable business partnerships and it should be a key part of your marketing strategy.There are various ways that you can go about it and the following tricks are only what have worked for me personally and may vary from what more traditional sources will teach you. Hopefully some of these will work for you too though…

Follow Journalists On Twitter

Journalism is one profession that has a massive representation on Twitter and you should tap in to this to build relationships with the people who are most likely to cover the story in your niche. Do a little research and you’ll easily find the journalists that are most relevant to you and you industry and start chatting to them. Don’t ever follow them and start bombarding them with links as this will work against you, simply start a conversation, share useful information and show them that you are a valuable member of the community. Once you have built a relationship you might want to send them a DM with your press release or even ask for their opinion on your product and ask if they would be interested in covering it.

Be Direct And Honest

A lot of us have a problem when looking for coverage in that we are not sure how to ask for it and we spend hours trying to find the right angles and beating around the bush. Journalists are busy people and a lot of them appreciate the direct approach. At the end of the day you are pitching to these guys to cover your story so throw in something like “would you be interested in covering this?” or “would this fit in to your weekly column?”. Pitching a journalist is exactly like pitching for investment or for clients in that it is a skill. It is a skill that you can improve on with practice but I would encourage brevity and the direct approach to save everybody’s time.

Kick Ass Press Release

I am not a huge fan of press releases myself but they are an essential part of the coverage process so you want to make sure that yours really stands out. Just imagine that every other company in the country is also out there being creative and trying to get their products covered so the 1 page email press release that you send to info@newspaper.com is really not going to stand out in the slightest. Use your imagination and make something that really stands out. I have used small personalized videos to journalists in the past (just a YouTube link) or send the press release in physically with some chocolates attached. Make them remember you.

Timing

Most newspapers finish writing news stories for the next day in the early evening and the weekend papers are mostly wrapped up on a Friday night. You’ll want to try and get coverage on quiet days and although you can’t predict when the next big natural disaster is going to happen you can check the local event guides and watch out for big stories that are happening that week and try and pitch your own story on a different day. Ideally send your story in to get coverage first thing in the morning (journalists will be flicking through their inbox looking for stuff to cover), on a quiet day, in the middle of the week and do it just as the journalist is looking for something in your niche (that last bit is the hard bit).

Bullshitting

You should never lie about what your product can and can’t do but you can certainly cherry pick the best parts of what you do and neglect to mention some of the info that you are not mad to show off. Journalists are not going to have time to look into every single number you provide them with so make sure you put your best foot forward. Be brave and don’t be scared to blow your own trumpet because nobody else will at all. Use the headlines to grab peoples’ attention like “Company X has 43% growth in Q2″ even if the figures only relate to one area of your product and others are struggling. Be creative with your numbers and facts but don’t ever lie as you will be found out and that will do way more damage.

Exclusives

Nothing will get a journalists creative juices flowing better than if they think they are getting an exclusive story that nobody else will have. These sort of stories will be rare enough for your company and may only come along once every couple of years but they are important to manage correctly. The word exclusive carries a lot of weight and don’t forget that you might want to give somebody a print exclusive, a radio exclusive and a TV exclusive. If you have good news on a regular basis you may want to spread the exclusives around to keep as many people happy as possible and so as people don’t think they are missing out.

Give Your Story An Angle

I listen to people every single day of the week with a new website telling me how amazing it is and how they think it would be great on X radio show or Y morning TV show. The big problem is that there are 1000s of new websites (or apply to whatever product or service you have) that launch every single day of the week. No matter how good you think your own website is it will never get coverage unless you give it a good angle. Lets say you own a golf website…you might want to run a survey on how golfers are using the Internet to drive down golf costs or show how your website is making golf a cheaper sport for people during the recession. You need to pitch something topical, newsworthy and with a nice angle other than “my new website is amazing”.

Use A PR company

If you do have the money and can afford to engage a professional to do it I would highly recommend it. As Bill Gates said â€œIf I was down to my last dollar, I’d spend it on public relations.â€”. You are never going to be able to build the sort of relationships with journalists that people in the PR industry have due to the fact that they are dealing with them day in day out. If you do have the resources to outsource your PR to the pros I would highly recommend it so as they can get you the most coverage and you can concentrate on what you do best, running your company.

Turn Yourself Into An Expert

The media are always looking for people to comment on stories and will often revert to the expert in the field. You need to make yourself that expert so as they come to you for comments and in return your business can benefit from the extra coverage. It doesn’t matter if your business is data backup or selling cars, you need to know everything you possibly can about your own business and let journalists know that you are willing to comment on stories relating to your topic of choice. One way to make yourself into an expert quickly is to establish your profile through a blog. This will give you the platform you need to build your profile and show people that you know your subject inside out.

Create The Story For The Journalist

Some journalists will kill me for saying this but I most often hear this from journalists themselves….Journalists are lazy bunch and you should do most of their work for them. What does that mean? Well you need to write a really good press release so as they can just copy and paste parts of their articles into their story. Have the right photos ready so as they don’t have to chase you. Get some good quotes ready and send them with your press release. Supply a high resolution logo. The more work that you can do for the journalist means the less that is left up in the air and the more chances you have of getting your story published.

A lot of these tips worked for me and you’ll find that it gets easier to get coverage as you get to know journalists and people within your industry a bit better. Have a go yourself and also share any tips or tricks that you have picked up yourself in the comments so as everybody can benefit. Good luck

Tiger Woods Golf Crash Getting The News

Niall Harbison — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 19:59:29 +0000

I am a golf nut and I am stunned at the fact that Tiger Woods has been in a very serious car crash and I am writing this as a demonstration of where news is heading. I am glued to every source to get the latest and a want to show you what new media does compared to old media….

Old media

Old media have not even picked the story up yet. Both of the main news breaking channels CNN and Sky News in the UK are running with daytime stories that are about 5 hours old. No sort of breaking news at all.

New media

The news is changing by the second as new sources on the ground emerge and website news report pop up. There are about 3000 tweets per minute on twitter talking about the subject and creating the news. News is spreading very very fast. The news is happening in real time.

Conclusion

If you ever needed proof that the way our lives are being lead and that how we consume media is changing then this is it. Old media is dead

The Twitter Times – A Social Newspaper?

Lauren Fisher — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:09:48 +0000

Twitter Times

More and more people are consuming their news through Twitter and using it as a sort of personalized RSS reader but the noise can be slightly overwhelming and it can be hard to find all the quality content between people promoting their own content. New service Twitter time.es is trying to solve that problem by creating a personalized newspaper for you where you can easily digest all the best most relevant content that appears in your stream. It is an ambitious project but they claim to be able to filter the best information not just from your followers but also from followers of your followers.

You can sign up for the service using your twitter account and your first newspaper will be delivered to you within the hour and on an ongoing basis they will be delivered every 30 minutes.

You can also grab a copy of other people’s newspapers to see what they will look like with Tim O’Reilly and Read Write Web already listed on the service.

Interesting project and with new features on the way it could be something the old media publishing world will be watching very carefully. I read my first copy this morning and it makes decent reading and is all very fresh and relevant content. Here is a short video explaining the service…

Content Is Not King

Lauren Fisher — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 09:33:09 +0000

There’s a popular phrase that’s been doing the rounds in internet and marketing circles that ‘Content is King’. Content is not King. The phrase has been troubling me for some time because it’s far too simplistic in its ideology.

Suggesting that ‘content is king’ is suggesting that a website with good content will solve all your problems. What it overlooks is the need for good distribution – essentially communication – of the content you produce. There’s no point in having good content if no-one’s consuming it. It simplifies the fact that anyone producing good content actually has to work hard to make people find it and that the content alone is not going to bring people to your website. Other than with a bit of good SEO. You need to create a community on your website, using the good content you produce, so that people are commenting, sharing your content or even creating their own. Many people have become preoccupied with creating good content without asking themselves who’s reading it and what they’re going to do if no-one is.

I was having a conversation around this with @pbizzle on Twitter and he came up with a new way of looking at it :

This is an excellent concept. Think of your content as the first stepping stone. It’s what you then do with the content that determines whether people will feel compelled to engage with it. Use your content as a commodity to start a conversation and consider the context in which you’re doing so. Content is not king because we are now saturated with good content producers so this isn’t enough anymore. You have to work harder for your visitors now and you don’t have long to retain their attention and ultimately, their loyalty, if they’ve stumbled across your site.

Andrew Odlyzko wrote a paper in 2001 titled ‘Content is not King’ in which he explores the history of communication and how it fits with the internet as a ‘content delivery system’. He argues that what our society historically been about is communication, connectivity. This is absolutely true and demonstrates that this is what companies should be considering and realising that good content alone does not facilitate a connected community around your brand.

It’s also worth considering the revenue model around good content. Many websites and companies are still producing good content but it’s password protected or blocked by a need to pay to consume it. We all know that the freemium model is now the practised standard if you’re leading someone through to content that requires a subscription. But this alone isn’t enough. If I’m going to part with my money for premium content I need to not only trust the person or company behind it, I need to have a relationship with them. I need to have built that up with them through other social tools so that not only can I trust that I’m about to pay for quality content, but that I’m actually willing to pay for it rather than get it for free because I want to support them.

Another reason why content is not king? We are no longer passive consumers. Good content alone is not going to engage me. It needs to facilitate different conversation points external to the site itself and I need to be able to contribute to the original material.

It’s time to stop thinking that content is king and realise that creating a good, active website cannot be defined by one facet alone. Content is one of aspect of this and certainly an important one, but it’s one among many.

One more step across the digital divide

Lauren Fisher — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 10:07:21 +0000

The intergration of online content and TV consumption is quite a hot topic at the moment. Many companies are experimenting with this new phenomenon, in a bid to successfully intergrate the two. Some are getting it wrong, but at least they’re experimenting with new ways to bring the two experiences together.

Some of us are taking matters into our own hands, tweeting from the laptop perched on our knees as we watch TV on the bigger screen in front of us. While hashtags on Twitter go some way to uniting the TV crowd through the internet, the problem of consumption of content remains a sticky issue. Crowding round a computer screen simply isn’t an inclusive activity, with many households having their computer in a separate room to the TV.

Boxee – a new service that’s just raised $6 million in second round funding may just change that. Boxee is a free to use, open-source application that allows you to view and stream content on your TV. The service also has a strong social network element, allowing users to share information publicly about what they’re watching and what they recommend across popular social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.

quick intro to boxee from boxee on Vimeo.

Boxee is not a complete hardware solution – you still need to connect your laptop to your TV to avail of the service, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction, bringing online capabilities straight onto your TV screen. The evolution of TV is one area that I’m watching with interest. I suspect it will be a long time before we change our habits and evolve beyond the current habit of ‘one eye on the computer, one eye on the TV’ though a change is clearly needed. Whether the answer lies in the TV or the computer or a whole new device we can’t even comprehend yet, remains to be seen…

10 Industries That The Internet And Social Media Will Revolutionize

Lauren Fisher — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 07:32:27 +0000

1.Print Media

Print media lived in it’s happy little bubble from the time that the printing press was invented right up until today when newspaper circulation is in decline and the industry is on the emergency operating table trying to find a new revenue stream. Should be fully killed off within the next 5 years and looking for a new permanent home online where it should thrive. Quality journalism will always need a home and that home is on the internet with mobile devices playing an increasingly important role.

2.Politics

It used to be very simple as politicians could control the message and as long as they were friendly with a few journalists they could send out a nice controlled positive message. The rise in social media and digital technology has seen a unsurprising rise in the amount of expense scandals as the whole industry becomes more transparent.

3.Television

Why would you bother sitting around waiting for your show to appear once a week at a specific time when all the major broadcasters now have their content available online to watch pretty much when you choose? Sites like Hulu and YouTube also feature more than enough content to keep you happy and the iPhone and other portable devices mean that more TV is being watched on the go than before. Broadcasters are playing around with new ways to engage the audience through social media as they actually watch the shows and when that happens properly the whole game could change again.

4.Hospitality

Eating out or staying in hotels used to rely on guidebooks, word of mouth and the odd review by a snooty restaurant reviewer but again social media has levelled the playing field. I can now choose from 100s of review sites and within a couple of minutes see what 100s of real paying customers have written about their experience.

5.Sports

Again this was an area that was very tightly controlled by the media for many a year and we could only get highlights packages but we now get a ringside seat with people like Lance Armstrong taking us around France with Twitter and video during the Tour De France. A gray area is emerging with services like Twitter as the authorities and broadcasters are trying to clamp down on athletes’ use of social media as they have been so used to controlling the message and are scared to death of losing their power. There will have to be a certain amount of control around issues like team selection and tactics etc but for the most part the new way in which we can see sports from the athlete’s perspective is exciting for all.

6.Music

Imagine that only a few years ago you were going in to a shop and physically buying a disk that cost you about 20 Euros (Or $) and you then had to store that at home? With a whole host of services like spotify and iTunes (probably getting a massive update to the cloud as we speak) for us to choose from and the likely hood that music is about to get even more social over the next couple of years we are in for some exciting times!

7.Recruitment

Getting a job was fairly straight forward providing the economy was ticking along nicely in the old days as you either knew somebody who was offering one, applied to an advert in a newspaper or used a recruitment company. The landscape has changed significantly however and now you are won’t have a chance unless your social media credentials are impeccable and you use services such as Linkedin. It is not that you won’t get a job if you are not using social media it is just that your chances increase significantly if you use it correctly and in challenging times like these you need every advantage you can get.

8.Advertising

Consumers are becoming far more aware of traditional advertising and brands are now having to actively engage their potential customers in increasingly innovative way. Who would have thought that brands like Coca Cola and Ford Motors would have to talk directly to their customers as part of their marketing campaigns and actually listen to what people were saying?

9.Public Relations

This is one of the industries that is slap bang in the middle of one of the biggest upheavals in it’s history as they just can’t control the message that their clients send out effectively any more. The rules are changing very fast and a lot of people are going to get caught with their trousers down standing in the headlights.

10.Shopping

I used to walk down to a physical shopping center and buy my clothes but I am now much more likely to buy them online and I will take the advice of friends in choosing where to do so and the chances are they will arrive in a couple of days and be far cheaper than I would pay in the shop beside me. If I have a problem with them chances are I will go online and get some great customer service that will solve my problem in no time! We can expect some very significant changes in the way we shop over the next year with augmented reality and the inevitable social elements of the tools that will be built around those services

All of the above changes are for the better and are only a small list of 10. Change is happening in every business from the smallest corner shop to the biggest corporation and it is all for the good!

Just Add Links You Idiots

Niall Harbison — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 10:14:56 +0000

Newspapers are in big big trouble at the moment as their whole business model is in tatters and to be quite frank I am delighted. You need to move with the times in business and they are literally miles behind and scrambling all over the place trying to find a new business model.

I know I consume their content on a daily basis for free and therefore can’t give out too much but as a user I would love it if they could just add links to the things they write about. The web is about transparency and is a huge network of links that helps you find good content, if your content is good enough I will keep on coming back again and again. If you are a newspaper and are covering a new product forcing me to open a new window to search for that product rather than just linking to the website of said company is not a good user experience and will annoy me. We know that newspapers and publishers all over the world had power over us and what we read for a century but the rules have changed and publishers need to start adding even more value to what they publish.

When will these people get it into their head that there is no way you can segregate the Internet and keep it behind closed walls and start linking to relevant information on other sites? Whoever does start doing that and creating more value for their readers will be the winners.