Guardian Unlimited

A different online strategy: Lag behind deliberately

Sunday, 25 March 2007, 10:52

The Independent on Sunday today contains an article that seeks to justify its editor-in-chief’s famous scepticism about new media.

Looking at the Telegraph’s multimedia newsroom, Tim Luckhurst says it’s working well, but wonders whether the Telegraph’s readership really cares. Despite its Hitwise claims, the Telegraph lags behind the Times and Guardian in online readership among the quality newspapers. Moreover, he notes, nobody seems to commenting on the Telegraph blogs. And the bloggers themselves don’t seem to be very enthusiastic, having failed, in some cases, to post for weeks on end.

Then come the quotes from various unnamed sources, including a “leading web site editor” and a Telegraph correspondent, who appear to share the Indy scepticism about newspapers blogging, podcasting and video.

And then, in the final paragraph, comes the Independent view:

It is already clear that Telegraph readers appreciate web coverage that emulates the content of a traditional newspaper. That is excellent news for newspapers in general, but it does not prove that rushing to embrace each new item of technology makes editorial or commercial sense. Waiting and watching has often been the astute response to revolutionary technology. Those who pioneer multimedia may not be the ones to do it best.

Judging by various interviews with editor-in-chief Simon Kelner and chief executive Ivan Fallon over the past few years, this seems to reflect the Indy’s position. Fallon has predicted problems for the Telegraph’s integration efforts. The Independent’s strategy seems to be that it will deliberately lag behind the other quality papers online, leave innovation to others, and then pick and chose which new media approaches to emulate. In his interview with the Guardian, Kelner said:

We’re happy not being pioneers, because it means we won’t get shot in the back. Our approach has been - and will be for the near future - that we’ll go about things more steadily, we’re not going to rush headlong into massive investment.

The Indy, of course, sees its online foot-dragging as a hard-headed businesses decision. Newspapers-printed-on-newsprint, they like to stress, are still booming globally (a valid point for a newspaper group with major interests in growing economies like South Africa and India), and they have sat backed and watched as their traditional rivals have invested millions into their web sites. The Times this year spent £10m on a web relaunch, and the Guardian will spend another £15m on its site over the next 18 months. Kelner, by contrast, can boast that his more humble web site is at least profitable — and increasing the revenue it generates significantly.

But if the Independent’s short-lived experiment with blogging is anything to go by, there is, of course no guarantee that this approach will be successful. The innovators will be way ahead, having learned what doesn’t work as well as what does. Those who follow the pioneers will have to reinvent the wheel every time.

Perhaps it’s most telling that the corner of Independent News & Media’s UK empire that makes all the money — the Belfast Telegraph — is not as reluctant about multimedia integration as the flagship in London.

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Visualising the UK journalism-blogger network

Thursday, 8 February 2007, 21:52

As Robin Hamman points out, there are all sorts of personal connections between the journalists named in Press Gazette’s UK journalism blogroll feature today.

Because many of the bloggers named in the piece also use the social bookmarking tool del.icio.us, it is even possible to visualise these connections using the amazing (and addictive) Del.icio.us Network Explorer social network analysis tool.

The dark nodes in the network above are people named in connection with the Press Gazette piece. I’m the green dot in the middle (only because I started exporling the network with my own user name), and Robin Hamman is the orange one.

Jem Stone is the large node at the top with links to many of the others. The author of the Press Gazette feature, Graham Holliday is to Robin’s 10 o’clock position, and Richard Sambrook is at Robin’s 3 o’clock.

Further exploration of the network reveals some other important nodes in the network, whose involvment in the jounralism blogger community is largely centred on their del.icio.us use: Sun communities editor Ilana Fox and Trinity Mirror’s director of regional digital media, David Black. You should really be subscribing to their del.icio.us links’ RSS feeds.

Update: Ditto Alan Connor, Alistair Brown, and Bruce Combe.

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Blogging vs journalism, yet again

Saturday, 3 February 2007, 14:39

A set of questions e-mailed to me by a journalism student have given me the opportunity to organise my thoughts on the relationship between “blogging” and “established media”.

Be warned — there are more than 1,200 words below the fold. But they can be summarised like this:

Media bloggers face questions like this every few months, and the problem is always the same. For some reason, many journalists and journalism students are still asking questions framed around the assumption that “bloggers” and “journalists” are mutually exclusive species. They also seem to assume that “journalists” are defined as people who work in “mainstream media”. Both of these assumptions are wrong.

Blogs are just a publishing technology, which can be used for distributing any type of content, including journalism. Some bloggers are journalists but most are not.

The real distinction is not based on the characteristics of the content published with these tools, but an economic distinction between an established business model based on mass-market publishing and a new type of micro-publishing that is based on inexpensive tools and low-cost infrastructure.

The real conflict is economic: specifically, the disruption to traditional publishing businesses caused by the drastic reduction in barriers to entry to publishing.

So here are my long, rambling answers to the student’s questions:

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