“Het Parool” – content is the key, being local is the tactics
October 10, 2008 by marek.miller
“Het Parool” has its average daily circulation of 90.000 copies. Frits Campagne, publisher of the newspaper, talks about the importance of local content in building a strong position of the newspaper.
Frits Campagne
Being a social democratic resistance newspaper during the World War II, “Het Parool” sticks to its traditions and resists the pessimistic market trends keeping its strong position on the local market in Amsterdam.
The newspaper has changed. After the redesign, the introduction of the new newspaper as “the newspaper of Amsterdam” was brought near its title. The photography in the paper improved – it got bigger and better. The reader is now given one subject only as his first choice to read. The navigation was kept for the second section of the day. The newspaper also moved from broadsheet to the tabloid format in 2004, and with a smart marketing campaign, it brought readers’ attention to it.
With its integrated website, “Het Parool” covers now most important information for people living in Amsterdam, that is best of Amsterdam, news, jobs, life in town, wining and dining, crime, weather and traffic. Most news and information have their agenda integrated with Google Maps.
In terms of the circulation of paid newspapers in the Netherlands (with a total daily paid circulation of all newspapers – 3,6 million copies), “Het Parool” selling almost 90.000 copies seems at first to be far behind such giants as national”De Telegraaf” that sells on average 725.000 copies daily. But, from the local point of view, of Amsterdam and its region, “Het Parool” is definitely the number 1 newspaper with its 30% reach (in comparison to the 27% reach of the second “De Telegraaf”). An important fact, is that despite the unstable, and dropping circulation of all newspapers in Holland, “Het Parool” resists them and has had a stable circulation index for about 5 years.
Even though the newspaper can reach 323.000 readers daily, it still is not enough for the publisher – says Frits Campagne. It has plans to reach for young readers (already 28% of the readers of “Het Parool” are younger than 34) and to expand on the mobile internet market.
[...] Juan Antonio Giner of Innovation Media talked about the necessity of the newspapers’ content reinvention. In his opinion, the today’s crisis of the newspapers is the crisis of content. This, plus being local, was also the main topic of Frits Campagne’s presentation. “Het Parool” builds its market position by being local and as close to its readers as possible. [...]