Ifra Conference: Beyond the Printed Word 2007
8-9 November, Citywest Hotel, Dublin, Ireland
427 participants from 43 countries
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http://ifra-nt.com/multiblog/beyond

Friday, 9 November full Session

Comments by XMA Cross Media Awards Winner
Angel Mario Tascon Ruiz, Director of Content PrisaCom, Spain

“We believe in the power of the people,” began Ruiz. “One brand, two media. El Pais prints 450,000 copies a day but the online version has 800,000 unique users per month. Our idea is participatory, with much space being given to the idea of ‘being part’ of the newspaper with polls, reader interviews, and even corrections playing their part.”

Clearly the online content is very different from the paper, with a great deal more content focusing on entertainment, more UGC, and of course video and audio. Blogs and profiles abound, many blogs being by those who don’t normally write for the paper. Different formats include comic strip blogs, to draw in those who don’t normally read the paper.

Large amounts of space dedicated to UGC ensure that people send in pictures, while user comments accompany every section of the news. Another highlight is the ‘Talentos’ section: “If you have something to tell others, if you are an artist, singer, or film maker, you send it in and we showcase it with winners every week.”

Operations take a two-newsroom approach: one for print, one for multimedia.

Ad models on news websites
Hooi Chong Ooi, General Manager, www.Sinchew-i.com, Sin Chew Media Corp., Malaysia

www.sinchew-i.com is a free news portal and the official site for Malaysia’s largest media group, SCMC (Sin Chew Media Corp Sdn Bhd). It currently has an average of 250,000,000 pageviews, 4,500,000 visits, and 2,250,000 unique visitors per month.

Conventional ad formats include banners, skyscrapers, midpage banners, and so on, but consumers reject hard sell adverts, and even the most attractive adverts have a very short “shelf life,” so how can their effectiveness be enhanced? A more subtle “storytelling” approach was the way to go. At the end of 2005 the site introduced a range of editorial-based ad formats – a marriage between editorial content and advertising.

Keyword advertising inside the text of news content (AdWord) joined editorial-based hyperlink advertising on the home page (AdText). These are often surprising, such as apparent user comments about games or weight loss that lead to adverts. The AdWords concept was expanded into AdQuotes, copy at the bottom of an article combined with keywords. AdBlogs combine video and Flash with advertising text and blog-style articles updated daily to deliver messages. AdBlogs are placed on the inside pages next to news articles.

An analysis of site traffic shows a tremendous surge whenever a major news event takes place. Therefore, the AdTrends editorial-based ad format was developed to capitalise on this effect. Ads are combined with surges in interest or events such as a rise in the stock market (and with it consumer confidence). Similarly, loan ads would be tied to falls in the interest rate.

A discounted call service, i-talk, also was created. The client bought the seven words that make up the days of the week: Monday to Sunday. The advertising message for each day describes a daily activity for most Malaysians that can be threaded together into a story about how i-talk can improve lives.

In conclusion, we believe that everything will return to the basics, Ooi said. Going back to basics doesn’t mean reverting to primitive methods; simplicity here refers to a change in focus – towards essence rather than mere decoration. In fact the methods used are extremely complex and refined.

Agents of Change; Finding and Funding Next Generation Web Services
Melinda Gipson, Director of Internet Publishing, GateHouse Media, U.S.A.

GateHouse owns 480 community newspapers, mostly in smaller, prosperous communities, with 120 papers in Illinois alone. Last year it relaunched more than 250 websites, and reaches more than 10 million people total on at least a weekly basis.

Gipson began with a sentiment rarely voiced at Ifra conferences: “We love Google technology and are working with Google to offer keyword search advertising to our merchants and joining the AdWords reseller program. We also use Google For Publishers to serve our web ads.” Why work with Google? “Because,” said Gipson, “video, paid search, and e-mail ads are only 32 percent of the pie right now but that will explode to 85 percent in the next two years.”

With regard to the newspaper landscape, Gipson acknowledges, “It’s rough out there and stock values of newspaper companies are diving, but the growth patterns are compelling.” The future for the next generation, according to Gipson, is collaboration. “Web 1.0 was static, Web 2.0 is more collaborative and news is a conversation. Web 3.0 – which we aspire to be – is about to capture the process of being interactive and make it integral and self-perpetuating. We want to grow our client base by going out to those who don’t advertise in the paper.” Success then comes from furthering local businesses and user satisfaction.

There is always a struggle between strengthening the core and integrating the new key partners. Gipson reeled off a list of online players (Zope, local.com, Basecamp, Yahoo HotJobs, Grouptivity, Wireless Nation, Magnify.net) with which GateHouse partners. “Make yourselves available to potential partners, take their phone calls, keep them in the loop on project timing.. be the glue for transactions in your local marketplace.”

Gipson then laid out some rules for the road: – Be willing to do the dirty work. – Partners can’t read newspapers’ minds, so be accessible. – Commit to the success of the project and of your partner. – Ensure equal risk and reward; ‘revenue share’ isn’t a dirty word, nor is ‘exit strategy’. – Stop trying to buy innovation. More can be gained by sharing and most companies that are bought end up broken. – Don’t waste time with partners who don’t value local and can’t adapt to geo-targeting. – Innovation is taxing, so don’t waste it on the trivial. – Don’t fear failure; if you don’t risk something you’re not going to come up with the big idea. (GateHouse is offering $1 million to anyone who comes up with the $50-million idea). – Get in the fray. – Share your success. – Finally, the mandate is grow – don’t just manage decline.

Online Classified Ads
Mark Laylor, Managing Director, Independent Digital, Ireland

Laylor also said Google is not to be despised but rather to be worked with. He considered the difficulties of engaging with the ‘new breed’ of citizens, those for whom the common coinage includes mashups, communities, the long tail, folksonomies, linklogs, and wikis – the ‘digital natives’. Indeed, Laylor defined his job as “hunting digital natives.” The problem is that the best people for that job aren’t sitting in newspaper buildings; they’re in the pure-plays working on artificial intelligence, operating systems, and networks, “so why don’t we go and tap into their knowledge for our benefits?”

The market, says Laylor, is a live ongoing conversation in which it’s hard to distinguish what is of value, but the big things are attitudes of openness, sharing, and peer to peer. “The medium is governed by the culture of the medium. We are looking to be expansive and specific. We provide independent editorial as the lifestyle, with verticals fulfilling the need. We need to extend beyond print and follow the consumer.” Laylor also warns that “we don’t own the space, so we introduce ourselves with care.”

When it comes to the issue of making money, Laylor believes strongly that instead of chasing after a certain demographic group, it is the market that decides. “I couldn’t give a tinker’s curse about the demographics. The name of the game is finding advertisers who fit that demographic [not the other way round], and ad agencies are starting to cotton on to this.”

Laylor then showcased some of the company’s sites including Loadzajobs.ie, Loadzatravel.ie, and other vertical sites for travel, property, and so on, as well as the educational portal Here2Learn and a lively student site, Push, with a bit more emphasis on beer, boys, and girls. Key to all of those offerings is that the database management layer is common to all: one data source, multiple publishing opportunities.

Breaking the Digital Ground
Liisa Kotilainen, President, Sanoma Digital, Finland

Sanoma is largest media company in the Nordic countries and 16th largest in Europe, with a presence in more than 20 countries and a strong digital portfolio. Liisa Kotilainen’s presentation focused on:

- Increasing newspaper reach with mass-appeal web sites;
- Going deeper into marketplace value chain; and
- Venturing into new digital business areas such as focused consumer interest sites.

Ilta-Sanomat is the number one tabloid in Finland, and Sanoma’s business daily, Taloussanomat, is a challenger in that market. In addition, Sanoma has several regional newspapers providing coverage in eastern Finland and has a portfolio of freesheets, such as Metro. In the digital world the Ilta-Sanomat web site is Finland’s number-three site based on TNS measuring (excluding Google, etc.). The business web site Taloussanomat.fi is one of Finland’s leading business web sites, and the freesheet Vartti’s web site focuses on the micro-local. Sanoma also has marketplace services including Huuto.net (Finland’s number one C2C auction site), Keltainen Pörssi (a horizontal C2C marketplace, especially strong in cars and motor vehicles) and Oikotie (horizontal B2C marketplace).

A separate company, Sanoma Digital, was set up in the beginning of 2007, creating new opportunities such as Style File, a fashion site with mashup potential with other Sanoma sites. Likewise, My Town is a user-centric and map-based local directory combining editorial and user generated content in a fresh and unique way.

So where is the money made? Traditional impression-based advertising models still dominate. Estimates indicate that the share of click- and lead-based advertising, including search, is going to exceed 50 percent in the near future and even reach 70 percent in some markets. Clearly, a constantly growing share of online advertising revenues will be generated by lead-based models.

What does that mean? In the Dutch market, for example, click-based advertising already accounts for half of the revenues. Impression-based advertising currently accounts for as much as 40 percent of the market, but its share is expected to be cut in half. At the same time lead- and sale-based revenue models are expected to increase their share significantly.

While established papers and their online sites can develop further revenue, there is a need to venture into new online areas. My Town users can search for local services and add their own favourite places to the directory. Marketers such as retail chains and restaurants can target advertisements at particular areas of the city. The service also links content such as news and event information from the newspaper web site. Style File provides a community for users who are interested in fashion and like the idea of sharing their wardrobe and comparing ideas with other users. Users can upload images of themselves wearing different clothing. These images can be commented by other users. The service includes also blogs, discussion forums and polls.

The main revenue sources are sponsorship and advertising based on deeper interaction with the user. Style File attained almost 50,000 unique visitors during its first week after official launch. The question for Sanoma Digital is not “how can we reach these people,” it’s “what do they really want. That’s our challenge now,” said Kotilainen.

Ifra Conference: Beyond the Printed Word 2007
8-9 November, Citywest Hotel, Dublin, Ireland
427 participants from 43 countries
—————————————————–
http://ifra-nt.com/multiblog/beyond

Thursday, 8 November
Morning Session

Opening comments
Reiner Mittelbach, Ifra CEO, followed by Co-chair Elan Lohmann, publisher, News24.com

Mittelbach started by welcoming the participants, segueing neatly from the theme of Beyond into the importance of having a strategy for coping with the future and from there to a recap of some of Ifra’s latest projects, including Where NEWS?, eRev 2011, and eNews 2010. With some twenty companies (including Amazon) preparing e-readers, eNews 2010 is a timely group learning experience with the first workshops starting next February.

Lohmann also welcomed the attendees in a variety of languages before noting that this year’s ‘Beyond’ — the 15th of these digital publishing conferences — revolved around the theme of connecting with the digital consumer and in particular with Web 2.0, diversification, and the quest for profit. For Lohmann the answer to all of this lies in creating interest around the content. “Things are changing fast,” he noted, “boundaries are breaking down and we all face challenges but there are also huge opportunities.” In particular he cited MSNBC’s recent purchase of Newsline.com and Microsoft’s investment in Facebook – a site that didn’t even merit a mention at last year’s conference.

“The web is becoming increasingly open while traditional media businesses are by nature more closed so one of the big questions is not just how we compete, but how do we figure out who is friend and who is foe.” Observing that the assembled gathering represented dozens of countries and markets, Lohmann expressed his desire that attendees could network, share, and learn from one another.

Keynote: from Consumer to Prosumer
Dr. Jo Groebel, Director, German Digital Institute

“Traditional media you might hear or see”, began Groebel, “but with digital media increasingly you experience it and with the experience comes a bigger impact and greater learning.” Groebel’s presentation explored the idea that we have progressed further than our wildest dreams and in the digital domain enthusiasm should be higher than it was in the ’90s. Yet there is a certain hesitancy about it. There is, he observed, a major challenge facing business and politics alike that in the past when we addressed media we meant a dominant medium, be that TV or radio, but for the first time we have numerous platforms and players that have to be addressed — “a jungle of challenges and multiple communications. But challenges are fun.”

While we are struck by the speed of the Web’s development, Groebel noted that the development and distribution of printing devices in the 15th century was faster than that of the Net. He also stated that while the importance of short-term developments are over-estimated, those of long-term developments are equally underestimated. “To those who say that blogs and the new journalism are just hype, I have to say that it isn’t so. Traditional media will probably survive but in a very different way. One thing for sure is that the age of uni-media focus is over; people increasingly want all kinds of content on all different platforms. Interoperability will be one of the key questions of the future. We’re talking not just laptops but the mobile world.”

The importance of papers, explained Groebel, is that their bold headlines and presence in the streets help define what is important at that moment in time. “It’s not about being informed but about having a physiological kick and the need to be emotionally stimulated – even the quality papers .”

The big three factors now are capacity, mobility and community. The explosion of broadband means you can broadcast everything as the capacity expands. Mobility is key since while the newspaper is the oldest mobile medium, now every medium is planning on going mobile, and thirdly community is still key. What the users want to see delivered on these platforms, are the ‘kick’, the emotion, information, communication, transaction, community and democracy. “If you want to teach people something you always need emotion. Those who believe text books and quality papers can do without emotion are wrong; even if your goal is to inform, you need that involvement.”

Groebel then explained that people themselves are changing along with their media habits with verbal intelligence (the ability to handle abstract concepts) having decreased over the last 30 years and visual intelligence (making form and narrative from images) notably increasing. Another point is that people are simply not always paying that much attention – “most of those we have analysed have the TV set on and at the same time are on the Net. I guess that most of those here do the same, so it’s not an either/or situation. There are periods during the day when people are willing to interact but there are others when they are not.”

Age is another factor that strongly influences audiences with baby boomers proving fairly passive in their media consumption, Generation X demanding options all the time, and Generation ‘Y’ (the current youth generation) purely and solely interested in community. That in itself raises the point that with UGC (user-generated content), the mass of the population is not creative but those that have talent have enough to “feed the mass.” The trick, says Groebel, is to find those talents.

With regard to UGC versus professional journalism, Groebel concludes that “one of the major findings of studies (and one confirmed by IBM) is that politicians all say we need professional journalists for their credibility and professionalism, but guess what? Ask the younger generation what is the most credible source of info and they answer ‘it’s the community’. People have built up a resistance to professional communication. Regardless of politics or country of origin they see professional communicators – be they politicians or journalists – as having vested interests in their backpacks.”

Educational differences in terms of media have largely disappeared. Once key defining factors of who chose what media educational differences are now being replaced by situation and mood – people in the morning have a completely different mood from the afternoon and that defines their media use. That, it seems, is where we now need to do our research.

Groebel finished on the subject of money, observing that “in the old online world, people were unwilling to pay for anything, but with multiple platforms and the mobile world we have a situation where people are willing to pay and it’s a little easier to make a bit of money.”

In conclusion, the media world of tomorrow is integrated with content and platform merging. It is immediate and it is digital, international but deriving its strength from being local. It is about being part of the ‘inner circle’ and a sense of information coming from the bottom up which will require an alliance between UGC and professional journalism.

Integrating Web 2.0 tools into news sites
Matthew Buckland, General Manager, Mail & Guardian Online, South Africa

Whilst admitting that he winces every time he hears the words ‘Web 2.0?, Buckland is forced to concede that the phrase is “useful in capturing the culture of the web and marketing its ideas to the mainstream.” Buckland feels that the beauty of Web 2.0 as an approach is that it means building web applications cheaply and collaboratively by harnessing web users’ collective intelligence. As a means of appreciating the difference between the old and new approaches he compared the relationship he has with Facebook with that he has with CNN.com. “Facebook knows all about me; CNN doesn’t know I exist. That’s an opportunity where a publishing network can come alive as a social network. Getting closer to your readers and building a community is what papers always used to do really well, but somewhere along the line we’ve lost that. Now in the Net era and specifically with Web 2.0, we have the opportunity to rekindle this relationship.”

The role of the media company is (or should be) changing with the publisher able to act as so much more – a facilitator, an aggregator, a blog publisher and effectively and ISP. Or as Buckland puts it, “Why let Google have all the fun?”

While stressing the importance of UGC, Buckland has made it a sacred rule that all content is edited, but that doesn’t limit them in their experiments with new online brands and “crazy things to keep the CEO awake at nights.”

Despite having one of the most expensive telecoms environments in the world, South Africa manages to rank as the sixth biggest country on Facebook by registered users, so the demand is there for online content. “Despite a changing and challenging environment where everyone is a writer and photographer, there is one constant, which is that people want quality which means stuff that’s relevant, useful, and compelling. The clutter and overload is the enemy of quality, and despite pressures from Web 2.0, media should never abandon its role as gatekeeper.”

Buckland went on to show a raft of UGC sites including Newsinphotos (http://photos.mg.co.za/); Amatomu, which ranks and rates the South African blogosphere; and Amagama, a blog provider. Content also comes in to the Thought Leader site, which invites contributors to share a platform with journalists and publish directly into the paper’s CMS, again via an editor. “People write better when they know that article is going to go through an editor, and you can build an audience quickly by making influential people part of your site offering.”

In total, these projects generated 700,000 words in three months without incurring a cent in costs, although to ensure sustainability the Mail and Guardian is now considering paying its bloggers – possibly on a per hit basis.

They said what? User content on news sites
Danny Dagan, Head of Online Communities, News Group Digital, UK

Dagan began by introducing the Sun newspaper – the best-read paper in the English speaking world with a circulation of 3.2 million and website with 10.6 million monthly unique users. What’s important about that site is that the paper has a strong identity, and as Dagan notes “[a blog on a newspaper site] isn’t the same as having a blog on Blogger or Yahoo. When you write a blog on a tabloid site you are making a statement – you are coming to something with a personality of its own and that in turn makes a statement about who you are and your alignment with the brand of the paper.” Consequently the Sun has a strong position on policing the contributions to its site, both for legal and brand reasons. That’s no mean feat with a major story able to generate 120,000 contributions to the discussion and 3 million views.

“With UGC there are many questions. In your terms do you allow kids under eighteen to enter the site? What do you do about parental controls? How does it affect your brand? If you decide to moderate, what does that mean for the content – will users accept that it may take a day for content to appear when they are used to immediacy? There are no clear standards. There is no set methodology.”

Dagan insists that good community management is to RGC (Reader Generated Content) what good editorial is to journalism, and that requires resources to pre-moderate. “People worry about personnel, resources, and costs, but my standard reply is to compare the number of people I have in online to the number on the editorial floor and then compare the number of readers of the paper to the number of visitors I get. If you don’t invest, it will only cost you more. One libel case can wipe out all your profit.”

To build a policy, Dagan’s preparation is exhaustive. “I like to gather as many lawyers as I can into a room and see what cases they feel strongly about, so I provide them a set of examples, I gave them 100 pieces of text and images – and ask them how long they are willing for that content to be on the web site before it’s taken down. And the answers to these give a definite approach to each application at a time and helps generate a moderation policy. Ours is 250 pages long and our moderators are tested on it once a quarter – which affects their bonus.”

To which he insists that the secret of success is to “ensure you have a clear escalation path, that the board understands they don’t have control over everything on the net, and that you have communicated your policy very clearly to users.” He also rejects mechanical moderation, as even a small amount of inappropriate content could cause severe damage for the brand. In an environment where the current legal expectation for takedown of material is measured in days, the Sun is committed to remove in minutes, with the average being around 2-3 minutes before reported material is removed.

Another innovative example of how QR Codes can be used courtesy of Springwise:

US-based Augme goes a step further. Instead of a text message, the site lets users create a unique two-dimensional barcode. When scanned by a cell phone, the viewer’s phone links up with the website embedded in the code: could be the wearer’s MySpace profile or a favourite cause. Augme also lets users link to profile pages they create on the Augme site. And the revenue model? An online store selling customizable tees. The range of shirts is rather limited at the moment—there’s an opp for other entrepreneurs! ;-)