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Industry News

Print vs Online: Interview with Marketing Mix

Just did this interview with Marketing Mix on the (yawn) print vs online debate…

What is your opinion on the general attitude of the newspaper industry towards the merging of online and print?

How far is SA behind (in general) when it comes to combining online and print?

What ‘cool’ things do you have on the M&G site that no one else does, and how are the ‘cool’ things working out – are people using RSS feeds etc, for example?

What are the problems/challenges facing publishers that actually want to embrace online?

Should SA publishers be worried about online? Is it a threat?

What is hampering the real growth of online at the moment?

How long do you think we have until online starts eating into circulation/ad revenue the way it has in the US and UK?

What are the next steps in terms of technology and integrating print and online that publishers need to embrace and use?

How can an online presence be using for success brand-building both for the newspaper itself as well as advertising clients?

Has online revenue started to make a positive impact on the overall bottom line?

Are clients and ad agencies geared for an online presence? If no, what needs to be done (by all parties) to ensure online ad revenue success?

What are the differences between having a print publication and an online site – ie what do publishers/journalists need to learn and understand about online in order to meet consumer expectations?

What is your opinion on citizen journalism and its part?

What do you do about premium news (subscribing mostly?) as most people won’t pay for the privilege esp as they can normally find the stories elsewhere on the internet? But how viable is free content?

Is there a threat yet to classifieds (print and online) from sites such as craigslist, and how do you combat this?

Answers over the page…..

The state of the blogosphere

According to Dave Sifry on the Technorati blog (the blog search engine) the blogosphere is literally DOUBLING every 5,5 months. There are about 40,7 million blogs around today, so that means if this formula is to be followed that there will be 80-million blogs by the end of 2006. What’s more is that a blog is being posted EVERY SECOND on the world wide web. There are about 50 000 blog posts every hour and 1,2-million legitimate posts per day. Now that is alot of content and alot of blogging.

When’s Technorati listing? I want to buy some shares.

Where are users looking on my webpage?

Have a look at this Google “heat map” that I took from www.google.com/adsense/tips. It shows, according to Google, the locations on your website that users tend to focus on. Google uses this as a guide to show you where you should position Adsense on your site — or any other kind of advert for that matter… or if you don’t like adverts just put important content there. It is an interesting demonstration of where users tend to look on a site.

Nitin Desai from UN wants a combined, killer new media and old media combination

Nitin Desai, Special Advisor to the Secretary General of the United Nations, had a few original words to say on the new wave of “We Media” sweeping the globe. He says that the key challenge – and this is the original part of what he said – is that we face a challenge in finding a business model that can combine the professionalism of the traditional, established media (fact checking; sources; trained journalists; ethics codes and training etc etc) with what we have on the web – the power of collaborative communities, citizen journalism, blogs, collective intelligence, number power etc etc…

Blogs vs traditional media: the Iraq issue

During the first panel discussion of the We Media conference in London a delegate at the conference whose name I didn’t catch stood up and made a very interesting comment. He says he works for a newspaper and that it was his job to review Iraqi blogs for the paper he works for to source stories and comment. He said that ever since he started doing this, he began “losing trust in newspapers” …

Hats off to Media24’s tabloids

Blogging the African Leadership Conference in Kenya, Nairobi

Ingo Capraro, Editor of the relatively new tabloid, Die Son in South Africa gave us a talk on the successes of the paper. Die Son is part of the powerful Media24/Naspers group – the biggest media player in Africa.

Die Son editor gave us a presentation on the newspaper’s successes. It is a tabloid unashamedly covering sex, scandal and has its own page three girl. There was a fair amount of criticism about what the paper was doing. Not sure what the fuss is about.

Who’s running the show at newspapers?

Blogging the African Leadership Conference in Kenya, Nairobi

Dr Peter Mwesige, Acting Head, Mass Communication Department, Makerere University and Former Executive Editor Monitor Publications in Uganda delivered an interesting speech on “African quality journalism”. He emphasised that if we treat the media “like any other business”, we distort the principles of journalism. He noted that there obviously needs to be a healthy mix with regards to the drive for profitability and good journalism, but that the drive for profitability seems to be affecting the craft of journalism. He’s right.

The blog phenomenon

When Gutenberg invented the printing press, he freed the publishers. But when the World Wide Web was pioneered by Tim Berners-Lee, it was said that the readers were now freed. The age of the internet has given unprecedented power to the reader by creating one of the most democratic and accessible forms of publishing yet – the blog.

The great convergence sideshow

It’s always been cheap and easy to publish on the web. Big professional, online publishers share the same medium as small-time, personal homepages. Online publishers typically publish at a lower cost than newspapers or magazines, making it an affordable option for shoestring publishers and budding entrepreneurs. It’s why they are in the web business in the first place.

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