Q&A with Tim Blott and Mark Smith about Newsquest Herald & Times online plans P1

Tim: It’s a wider online strategy that incorporates subscription. For us, along with a number of other publishers, it was a question of improving the online proposition to a level where we felt we could charge for it. We’ve got to a position where we believe where we can introduce registration, which is starting to catch up. Now we can start to look at content and get more involved in that content, which is where we are now. By the end of the year we believe that we will have a sufficiently engaged audience who will then be prepared to start paying.

Our audience has grown and grown and measuring the quality of that audience and not just the size of the audience per se is a crucial aspect in terms of our strategy. It’s not just numbers, although the numbers are good and strong, particularly in comparison with STV and other digital propositions. So the numbers are good, particularly in being able to identify a quality audience within that. Ours is a Scottish based news online proposition and we’re lest interested in ex-pats as we are in terms of utilising Scottish audience that we can offer to Scottish advertisers. And in conjunction with S1 and some of our other commercial platforms, in terms of a holistic approach, our expertise in terms of the commercial proposition and the audience that S1 already generates, it helps us overall to be able to offer that audience as well as the newspaper audience.

Mark: Herald Scotland, along with any other news site in Scotland, attracts big numbers in terms of monthly users. Like all other sites, it’s only a fraction of that total that are regularly coming back and are a loyal audience and are engaging on a regular basis with the brand. That’s what our focus needs to be. The value of someone in Peru visiting Herald Scotland once and never coming back is zero. The industry has generally been kidding themselves when it talks about monthly uniques and the vast majority of those uniques are not engaging with their brand. They are just happening to find an article through Google by chance and never coming back. We are recognising that and focusing primarily on real numbers. Our key metric is not monthly uniques, it’s repeat visitors.

So you’ll be charging for online content as part of this plan?

Mark: In certain areas we have already introduced a charging mechanism, albeit a relatively low-key, but we are charging for some of our crosswords, but it’s not big numbers or big money, but it is steady income. Where the industry is in turmoil is whether they feel the value of their content is good enough to be able to charge. Our aspects and strategy is based around unique and distinctive Scottish content. We do not believe that we will be able to charge for what is readily available on the BBC or elsewhere. It has to be what is very relevant to the Scottish audience and what our journalists can deliver to that audience which is sufficiently compelling that they won’t get elsewhere.

It won’t be that you pay from day 1. There will be elements where we will draw them in with a certain number of articles being open, and then beyond that they will then pay for it. It’s similar to the model adopted by the Financial Times.

Will you be recruiting as part of this process?

Mark: Strategy still being developed – but no additional staff is required. No new posts created – existing team. “It’s not a big, structural change. It’s taking the strategy that existed and moving it a bit and we have the team in place to do that.”

How do you feel working online has changed the job of a journalist?

Tim: It is a different media and a far more interactive media. From my experience, journalists are evolving, and quickly, from where it was a one-dimensional experience where they submitted an article and the public reacted through a letter or a phone call. Now that interaction can be immediate and it can spark a debate and carry the story forward. A lot of good journalists recognise the value of that and are becoming more-and-more interactive with social media and looking at stories in a different way. Now they start to see the statistics that come back from the internet, rather than just circulation statistics which can be hard to relate to. They can see what reaction their individual stories are getting online and make their own assessments as to what really appeals to the public as opposed to what they feel appeals. That’s a new dimension for journalism generally, but most good journalists embrace that and find that very interesting and very refreshing. We’ve got more journalists coming to us and asking to work with social media and learn how to use it.

Mark: There’s a real hunger there. When I took over this role, within weeks I was getting emails from journalists asking if I was the guy who could finally set them up a Twitter feed. There was this hunger to do it, which is great.

Tim: Previously, and the reason behind making this change is because, a lot of the print-based editors were struggling even to deal with their own journalists in trying to manage this. They were saying to them ‘I want you to write a story to appear in the first edition of the paper’ and then they were thinking about how to use it online later. Life isn’t like that anymore. It has to incorporate more than one set of media and a good number of our journalists are very actively involved, which is benefitting both the paper and our digital platforms.

It’s a question of understanding the media you’re dealing with and how, and when, you use those stories. It’s very much down to our editors to decide whether they feel they have an exclusive story that should go into print before it goes online. Certainly we don’t want to accelerate any print circulation decline by putting stories onto the web which might be lost to other media. There’s no doubt that once you’re published online that a lot of other media can then aggregate those stories and take them and offer them as their own. At the same time, there has to be an appreciation as to whether that truly is an exclusive. In certain cases some of those stories that traditionally journalists would not have wanted to release to the web. Now they understand that that story is widely available, it’s on the news, it’s on the radio, it’s all over the place, so it need to be on the website if we’re to have any credibility.

Recently radio figures came out and seem to indicate a huge resurgence in terms of a radio audience. Now I am old enough to remember people saying that ‘radio is dying’ and that it was going to collapse. And similarly I have heard the same said about television and cinema. When any new technology comes in it changes the context. It will for print and it will for the internet. As the internet evolves and different people come out with new technology, it’s going to influence that media and change the context. The same will apply for print as it will with cinema, radio and TV. In terms of the internet, our proposition has to fully complement all sides of media to deliver for the audience. They have to look at our website and think ‘that is a fantastic proposition and I am fully bought into that and I can understand how that is used and how it is different from print’. The newspaper and website need to complement each other and I strongly believe that the best websites and the best newspapers can do that.

So what paid-for media strategy will you look to emulate?

Tim: There’s a divergence of opinion, so what you’ve got is people like Alan Rusbridger and the Guardian which has taken a particular view that their website it all important and the print product is less important. We don’t take that view. We take the view that both are important and we want to develop them and we believe that we can develop them to the best possible quality and that will be appreciated by people in Scotland. There’s a divergence of opinion about subscription as to whether there is a true value in that content or whether there isn’t. Certainly for UK-wide publications who are dealing with content which is very similar to what appears elsewhere, then I can understand where they are struggling to find how they could sell that content, when it’s appearing in a number of other publications, or the BBC or elsewhere. What we’re talking about is content that is specifically Scottish and is sufficiently distinct so that people will say ‘I cannot get that content from any other publication or any other news organisation’.

Mark: There’s a variety of subscription models out there and we are looking at them all and learning from them. Ours isn’t going to be the Time paywall. It’s going to be much more porous, so we think that what others have done, from our point of view, makes better sense for us. News International get the headlines all of the time, but it’s not just about how they’ve done what they’ve done. Every type of brand will have a different approach. The Guardian’s approach, the space that they are competing in, is global. Herald Scotland is never going to compete for a global audience. Our strategy is going to be different. The Guardian are going after a massive audience and we’re trying to, as are the Daily Mail online, going after advertising dollars on a global scale. That’s not a strategy we could aspire to.

Smith says that a number of stories will still be available to read to new users, before they are asked to subscribe, but admits that they don’t yet know number of stories before subscribing at the moment.

Mark: All commercial channels, classified channels, business director channel – anything commercially led will be open. We’re going to introduce for the first time proper rolling news and rolling sports news. Decision have yet to be taken on that, but I suspect that will remain open as well because that is the kind of content that is available everywhere. We want to focus on creating compelling, unique content that our users will perceive really value from.

It will have a different layout and a slightly different structure, but the brand layout will remain the same and the page layout will have a different structure.

We have internal targets but we’re keeping those to ourselves at the moment.

In the second part of this discussion, running tomorrow, the pair discuss online local news strategies and more about the subscription plans.