Q&A with Tim Blott and Mark Smith about Newsquest Herald & Times online plans P2

Tim: Local news is always important. It’s more a question of how you define local news ‘What is local news?’ I’m always struck when people say to me ‘when local news is important to me, but other people’s local news is very boring’. It’s an individual assessment. Some of the community sites, with STV to a large extend, took some of our staff and also adopted some of our strategy in terms of local sites. Local sites were initially launched by S1, and STV, having launched their IFNC battle, probably learned the lesson in terms of online and have pursued a policy in terms of local sites. It’s just a question of the quality of those sites. Saying that you’ve got 200 local websites doesn’t necessarily mean anything unless the quality of those individual sites is sufficiently compelling both to the audience and the advertisers, whereby they will look at them, use them, and advertise on them. Our strategy in terms of local sites it to look at quality in terms of quantity. If we can find the right dynamics within a community of websites locally, then yes, there will be a benefit to everybody. But just creating a prolific number of local news sites where there is very little information or advertising, but just a name at the top, that’s not necessarily help the people involved or the organisations producing it because it’s very time intensive with very high labour costs.

Mark: Local news strategy is something different. I don’t see anybody in the marketplace doing anything terribly out of the ordinary or different. The local news concept is fairly straight forward and simply. It’s no different from any other news proposition; it’s just that you’re focusing on a very different area. Can we provide good, unique content at a local community level, that’s a very different beast from Herald Scotland.

Tim: To me one of the things that encapsulate what a good local site is, we have an S1 local site [Millport] which was actively being marketed by the people who were running it, and we didn’t even know. In a sense, they’d embraced it, taken over the concept and were marketing it elsewhere, and we were unaware of it. That showed the ability of where you can capture imagination and enthusiasm and it worked very well.

Mark: The central questions about local sites is, to what degree do you allow user generated content and how commercially successful can they be, depending on the content that you are going to generate. Ultimately user generated content is never going to be the same quality as that of ‘professional’ quality. But you could do both and you could bring the two together.

What response have you had from those you have informed of your plans to charge for some online content so far?

Mark: The agencies we’ve spoken to understand the sense of it. They are obviously much more interested in advertising to an audience that they understand. By and large agencies are throwing up hundreds of thousands of page impressions and trying to hit an audience that they don’t know very much about. There’s various techniques about behavioural tracking that work on a national level. I’m not so convinced that they work regionally. The more we understand about our audience and focus on our core audience, the better it is for advertisers, and agencies are saying similar things to us.

Where do you think this strategy could take the company?

Tim: It’s exponential. In many senses, the advantages of the Herald & Times Group is that we have a very successful online business, we have a magazine business, we have a printing business and we have a newspaper business and really it’s a question of how you can develop all of the revenue streams within all of those businesses and develop the profits so that each of those grows and flourishes. If in developing our website they grow, and grow, then fantastic. That will underpin the reason why we employ so many journalists and their content is sufficiently appreciated, not just across one platform, print, but also across digital. That’s where journalists will see enormous benefits provided by the internet and it won’t be seen as a threat to their livelihoods but will be seen as a saviour in some cases to their livelihoods as you seem to see within the industry as some of the people who leave newspapers begin to blog and so forth, just for the sheer love of doing it. And once they start to interact with that audience and they start to understand how different it is from the days when they were just writing for print, to the days when they are conversing with our audience and people are responding to them. That’s the job that journalism can learn from the internet as long as it’s used properly.

What do you mean by ‘used properly?’

Tim: If it’s a pure replication of what’s in print then there’s no enhancement for the user experience. If you’ve already read the paper and you then go online and there’s nothing else new online, then it’s a disappointing experience. Really, again, in terms of what print can deliver as opposed to what the internet can deliver, that sense of immediacy is much greater in terms of the internet and interactivity is greater. You can talk to your audience and they can talk to you. Journalists now see that enormous benefit and they can see all of these people responding to their news and taking them to task or challenging them, which is fantastic for a journalist to get that feedback. The internet needs to take things further on. It can’t just be a static reproduction of what’s in print and that’s where I see the advantage of what the internet can deliver. Unfortunately too many sites are just purely an electronic replication of what is in print, and that either destroys the reason for going out and buying a newspaper, or it just doesn’t add anything to the experience.