forum4editors.com » business model

Is iPhone a panacea for newsmedia digital revenues?

grzegorz.piechota — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 08:30:47 +0000

Mark Challinor, director of mobile at the Daily Telegraph (UK), answers to the question: does the success of the iPhone represent the answer to future digital revenue streams for newsmedia companies?
Mark gave this speech at the INMA World Congress in New York this April:

Hunting the elusive online business model in news

grzegorz.piechota — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 08:24:57 +0000

Do throw spaghetti to the wall! It’s just one piece of advice that prof. George Brock of the City University in London, a former Saturday editor of the Times, offers to news publishers.
Here’s his presentation to Zeitung Online 2010 conference in Dusseldorf, Germany, in June 2010. Shared by LinkedIn/Slideshare:

LePost.fr: How amateurs produce valuable journalism

marek.miller — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 12:42:37 +0000

Two weeks before the start of the INMA / OPA Outlook 2010 conference, Forum4Editors is here with the series of exlusive interviews. The speakers who will be presenting their ideas during the conference agreed to answer few questions about what they do best, and what, in their opinion, is the best strategy to develop the best relation with their readers.

First in the series is Benoît Raphaël, the Editor in Chief of LePost.fr, a subsidiary of “Le Monde”. He will be telling us about this new brand of Le Monde featuring user-generated content, videos, blogs, and more.

forum4editors: LePost.fr is a subbrand of Le Monde. What differs this project from other based on civil journalism? What is Le Post all about?

Benoît Raphaël: LePost’s model is quite unique in the world: it’s a social media + a newsroom of journalists who produce their own content and co-produce news with users. Le Post take the “pulse” of the news : what people are talking about concerning the news.

At Le Post, a journalist is, at the same time, a news producer, an aggregator and a community organizer. Because of the way he approaches information, he is first a network journalist. He checks first what has been said and published in other media. He aggregates the best content from different sources, including blogs, Twitter, You Tube, etc. and traditional medias. Then, on some of them, he brings complementary information, new elements, adds value and fact checks. Even the news published by other journalists.
The information is a permanent conversation that is built step by step by the community of am and the journalists.
Each journalist is also in charge of a small group of active amateurs. He is their coach and teachs them the basics of the journalist job, tries to encourage them and even meets them in person. He understands that information is a conversation. He does not produce an article but more a process.

How popular is Le Post in France?

After 2 years, it’s trafic is about 2,5 million unique visitors (Nielsen) a month.

Who creates the content for the site?

Users (communities), invited bloggers and journalists.

All the content is filtered, a posteriori, by a team of moderators. We want to make sure that there is no illegal content, that am follow our guidelines and that they are not propagating rumors. Then, the newsroom also looks at it. Each journalist is specialized and manages a small community of am that he trusts. So each interesting content that we receive is checked according to our techniques of “fast fact checking” that we have developed.

The problem with Twitter and social media services is that there is a very low percentage of users actually producing content. It is said that among one hundred of Twitter users, only one creates content, ten reply, and the rest is following in silence. Le Post is a mixture of amateur and professional content. How high is the users’ activity? Where do you take professional content from?

2% of readers produce content (8,000 comments a day, 500 posts a day).
We publish 500 am articles a day versus 40 from pro. But, it does not mean anything because in fact the newsroom really takes advantage of the community, reacts to what they are sending, checks and updates information. The majority of the articles that appear on the HP (70 a day) are a mix of pro and am. In fact, our goal is to co-produce the content, not to have on one side the pro and on the other side the am.

What makes a reader-generated content more attractive than the one generated by professional journalists?

Active amateurs help us to collect and add value to information by proposing smart angles, aggregating, finding witnesses, etc. They are also “the eyes of the newsroom”. They are following the news for us, on print, tv, radio, news sites, but also blogs. They are sending us valuable links with quotes.
And sometimes, they are helping us on fact checking. It is because of an amateur that we have been able to figure out that a video about Gaza was a fraud. France 2 (the French public television chanel) published the video without fact checking it.

Why do you create a separate brand for reader-generrated content? If you believe in it, why don’t you integrate with Le Monde’s brand?

Because we needed to be free to experiment. And you can’t really experiment when you have a strong brand. You can’t risk to degrade it by making errors, testing new ways to produce news…

And, we’re more “popular” than Le Monde, with more politics, crimes and accidents, web/buzz subjects, montages and collages with news content, and testimonies… not exactly the type of news what LeMonde’s readers are used to read.

Thank you very much.

Peter Vandermeersch: how newspapers can set a mobile strategy

tom.corbett — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 11:43:36 +0000

The first step is a mental one, claims Peter Vandermeersch, an editor-in-chief of De Standaard, a Belgian daily newspaper.

De Standaard is published by a Belgian group Corelio.

Mr. Vandermeersch spoke at the Web Goes Mobile seminar in Grimbergen in Belgium on Dec. 4, 2008. (Read a summary of his speech written by Tom Corbett.)

Peter Vandermeersch gave a short interview to Inge van Gaal of INMA.

Asked for an advice how newspapers can set their mobile strategy, he said: ”The major advice is to forget that we are newspaper companies to realize that we are media companies.Some content that we are strong at, that we produce daily has to go the paper, but the other content really has to go on web and mobile immidiately. If you make this mental step, that is the basic point to set a successful mobile strategy in your companies.”

Watch full interview:

(Video by Tom Corbett of INMA.)

Mobile strategy: from mass to tailor-made advertising

tom.corbett — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 23:26:20 +0000

“Mobile is going to be an advertising revenue-driven business as it is online,” believes Peter Vandermeersch, an editor-in-chief of De Standaard, a Belgian daily newspaper.

Mr. Vandermeersch spoke at the Web Goes Mobile seminar in Grimbergen in Belgium on Dec. 4, 2008. He gave there an overview of mobile strategy at his Corelio publishing group.

“It’s clear that content online is expected to be free by everyone. We still have a base of 4000 paying customers for our website; but this has been the case for a few years now and that base is not growing. So it’s an advertising revenue-driven business. So is the mobile,” he said.

The Corelio strategy on mobile web has two directions:

Proximity. Within a site of the company’s popular newspaper “Het Nieuwsblad”, they have 309 local sites. One for each city, town, village in the Dutch-speaking area of Belgium (Flanders). Very local news and… very local advertisers!
Quality. De Standaard – a Corelio’s quality paper – focuses not on local news, but on quality national news covered by professional journalists.

Peter Vandermeersch gave an example how De Standaard is delivering news on multiple platforms:

When a breaking news is discovered, users receive an SMS with just one sentence of what has happened and a link to the mobile site for more informaton.
Then a full article is published online (on desktop internet) with for example an interview or a short video.
In-depth analysis, background information is given in the printed paper.

Currently, Corelio has three mobile sites:

m.standaard.be

Launch: June 16, 2008 (It has been launched in just 8 weeks!)

Content: news, business and showbusiness.

Traffic: 500,000 page views/month.

m.standaard.be

m.jobat.be

Launch: August 20, 2008

Content: classified advertising (originally “JobAt” is a weekly recruitment classified ad supplement to weekend editions of all Corelio newspapers)

m.jobat.be

m.nieuwsblad.be

Launch: November 30, 2008

Content: regional news, live sports results, agenda of things to do in town for ‘going out’

m.nieuwsblad.be

Corelio’s mobile plans

Currently, Corelio is not very strong in “mobile interactivity”: there are some info & breaking news alerts by SMS, some text games.

But in the near future, according to Peter Vandermeersch, Corelio wants to extend its mobile interactive features through polls, user-generated-content, gaming, chats, etc.

Corelio is going to implement “geo services” too: for example restaurant reviews of places around your current location and book ratings in a mobile friendly way for when you’re in a book shop.

Lessons

Here are some lessons that Corelio has learnt developing its mobile content business:

build your mobile knowledge
build a coherent vision
team up with competent partners
build real mobile sites
focus on quality and speed

Challenges

Mr. Vandermeersch said there were some challenges for mobile publishers in Belgium:

Different revenue sharing standards between the carriers and publishers are needed.
Rates of data-transfer subscriptions are still high in Belgium.
Monetisation: how to gain advertising and earn on interactivity?

“If we can overcome these challenges in the near future, we will believe very much in mobile internet,” said Peter Vandermeersch.