Sunday Herald bets on views not news
So…The Sunday Herald is to become a magazine.
This is a first for a UK newspaper and follows in the footsteps of recent mainstream media innovations such as online editions, tabloid formats and even pay walls.
It’s a massive change for the Scottish media environment – and all the UK media owners will be watching carefully.
According to the Sunday Herald, the change will “better project the quality of [its] journalism” with a focus on in-depth analysis, reportage and high quality photography.
The shift, then, is a dramatic one. My sources tell me there could be as few as six pages dedicated to news reporting, which means 86 pages for commentary, features, analysis and pictures. This has serious repercussions for marketeers, and particularly for PRs.
The shift from news to views isn’t in itself new – The Independent has for many years carried the ‘viewspaper’ title, and although it was not self-imposed, the paper now ironically carries a ‘Viewspaper’ insert for its comment pieces and reviews.
But is this a trend? Has a newspaper become a credible vehicle for a journalist’s personal opinion? Of course, the dawn of the Leader article in most papers has all but made that debate redundant, but the Sunday Herald’s shift from news to views does raise a different question about media consumption.
An Ofcom study last year found that the average media consumer’s digital day is over seven hours long, with breakfast radio, our favourite TV shows, surfing the net, social networking and texting all playing a part. In all, media takes up 45% of our time: we are at information overload.
I will never forget attending a conference about youth engagement two years ago. A 14-year-old panellist described his evening after school. It went something like this: “I get home from school, go to my room, turn on the TV, start up my Xbox, turn on my laptop, get out my mobile phone…and watch telly, play video games, monitor Facebook and Bebo, text and surf the web all at the same time. If I get a phone call I might stop watching telly.”
Media consumption is now so engrained into most generations’ daily routine that news is a constant, not a choice. And news is ubiquitous, with exclusivity getting rarer as citizen reporters, bloggers and freelance journalists increasingly contribute to the kaleidoscopic array of information we can consume.
You could argue that the real value is in views. That the premium content will become the carefully crafted, differentiating analysis that wakes us from our slumber and reminds us this stuff matters.
Perhaps the Sunday Herald is just the first to make the point quite so literally.
We watch with interest.