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10 July 2008
Future on the line for regionals
Regional papers are turning to the net for their future revenue streams, as they haemorrhage advertisers from their print editions amid growing economic uncertainty.

7 July 2008
Mobile journalists to share desks
Mobile journalists, or mojos, face losing their desks as newspapers look to take advantage of mobile technologies, such as laptops and WiFi, to cut down on office real estate.

3 July 2008
Regional star does four million impressions
The web offering of Britain's biggest-selling regional evening newspaper, the Express & Star, has reached a new milestone by breaking through the four million barrier for monthly page impressions.

30 June 2008
Journalists should take blogging seriously
Too few journalists treat blogging seriously and are failing to grasp the truth that the blogging revolution is threatening the established order of journalism, according to Guardian media commentator, Roy Greenslade.

26 June 2008
BBC wants Ł800,000 local video kitty
The BBC has unveiled plans for an £800,000 fund to source local video content from outside the organisation, as part of a £68 million investment in its local network.

23 June 2008
Mail posts first-class online figures
Mail Online has leapfrogged Telegraph.co.uk to become the most popular online national newspaper, according to the latest Audit Bureau of Circulation Electronic (ABCe) statistics.

Archive...

23 July 2007

Newspaper websites barking up wrong tree

Newspaper groups are barking mad to divert resources from print media to nurture their websites, as online readership figures aren’t as exciting as they think – warns international newspaper consultant, John Duncan.

Speaking to Press Gazette, the former managing editor of The Observer believes his own calculations destroy the myth that newspaper websites are killing off their print counterparts. And he claims that print is still the more popular medium.

One of the biggest problems, explained Duncan, is the inconsistency in the figures for unique website users, which can vary drastically between metrics companies.

But even taking the most generous figures he reckons that the readership of GuardianUnlimited, Britain’s most popular newspaper website, is about 270,000 unique users – compared with a million for The Guardian. So if this is true for the newspaper with the most successful online operation, Duncan questions what it says about the others.

He told Press Gazette that his estimates were of readers and not of merely purchasers or website users.

This is bad news for newspaper people who, according to Duncan, think they are nurturing a rottweiler puppy – but which is in fact a fully grown poodle. This means a bad outlook for selling advertising, where newspapers are competing with many other internet sites. Duncan believes their efforts would be better spent focusing on print.