The rush to go online

A survey of of magazine web sites by the Columbia Journalism Review has shown that there are varying standards between the print and online editions of many magazines.

In particular,over nearly 60 per cent of respondents admitted to either less or no copy editing online as well as less vigorous fact checking and no indication to readers that mistakes had been made.

There was also evidence that decison making structues for online sites varied dramatically with people working for the print side expected to work online without being given adequate training in writing for the web.

The survey also found a number of advantages in using Independent web editors.They was a correlation between their use and profitablity as well as a tendency to use dedicated web staff.

Interestingly most publications didn't distinguish between selling advertising online and for print.

Although those involved with magazines and their Web sites have varying levels of knowledge and sophistication about their métier, it’s fair to say that the proprietors of these sites don’t, for the most part, know what one another is doing, that there are no generally accepted standards or practices, that each Web site is making it up as it goes along, that it is like the wild west out there.

Noodles and online news

To describe online news as being like Ramwn noodles maybe a strange analogy but as Seth Lewis asks what is the underlying economic value of online news, anyway?

He refers to the work of Iris Chyi who believes

"she found the answer in the economic principle of “inferior goods.” The idea is simple: When income increases, consumers buy more “normal goods” (think: steak) and fewer “inferior goods” (think: ramen noodles). When income goes down, the opposite occurs (again, all things being equal in economics terms). Inferiority, in this case, isn’t so much a statement of actual quality as it is of consumer perception and demand. If we get richer, our desires for steak go up and our desires for ramen go down."

So how does this apply to journalism? Well

“Users perceive online news in similar ways — online news fulfills certain needs but is not perceived as desirable as print newspapers,”

So when we are feeling more affluent,we will foresake the digital screen for the plaesure of opening a newspaper or magazine.

Print revenue worth more than 15 times that of online?

Some interesting stats from across the Atlantic

Print newspapers took in $34.7 billion in advertising revenue last year and had 49 million subscribers. That works out to $709 per subscriber

whereas

Newspapers online had $3.1 billion in ad revenue last year and averaged 67.3 million unique visitors per month. That’s $46 per reader.

That means a print subscriber is worth more than 15 times the revenue an online reader is.

Perhaps though not quite as bad-

Not all online newspaper readers are made equal. The top, say 10 percent of readers, who visit the home page twice a day are worth exponentially more than the bottom 10 percent, junk traffic that bounces in off Digg or some blog and which sees a page or two and spends maybe 10 seconds on the site. I wish I could quantify how much the top 10 percent are worth, but I’ve never been able to find data on that. Still, remove the junk traffic, and the online revenue per reader would rise.

The blunt logic of online strategy

Maybe this American publication has got the balance right between online and print?

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette is selling more weekday copies than a decade ago and the reason could be that they've been giving free access to their Web sites only to people who subscribe to the printed edition.

Via Huffington Post

The blunt logic is starting to resonate with many newspaper publishers, who are preparing to erect toll booths on parts, if not all, of their Web sites. They hope the switch brings in more online revenue and gives print subscribers another reason to keep buying the newspaper.

Online future but opportunities for print

A new survey out in America seems to confirm the trend for online.

Editor and Publisher reports that

The time spent reading newspapers online has increased greatly while the pace of online readership has accelerated,

The findings come from a study by the Center for the Digital Future at USC's Annenberg School for Communications.

The study found that

1.readers on average read online newspapers for an average of 53 minutes per week

2.22 per cent of people had stopped taking out subscriptions for printed newspapers or magazines.

However the report is not all gloom for the printed word.

Centre Director Jeffrey I Cole said that the digital platform allows newspapers to compete for the first time in 60 years with television and radio in the business of breaking news

Steps in going online exclusive

Some great tips about switching from print to online are contained in this post over at Smashing magazine (ht-Andy Dickinson)

This is the short list of things to consider for the detail follow the link

1.Choose the format-There are three basic formats for digital publication

2.Design considerations-including typography,use of images,

3.Distribution such as RSS feeds,emails and subscribers.

4.Generating revenues

Study suggests online only

A study by London's City University suggests that if newspapers go to an online only model it will adversely effect profitability.(via Journalism.co.uk)

The case study is built on the Finnish financial daily Taloussanomat which took the decision to go digital only and discovered

a 22 per cent drop in unique users and 11 per cent fall in page impressions.

along with

The title's revenue has decreased by 75 per cent over the same period, because of the loss of print advertising,

The minefield of comparing print and online hits

There is an interesting analysis of the methods of comparing Print and online page impressions by Dan Thorton( Ht-Martin Belam)

comparing print and online readerships directly in this way is equivalent to comparing the number of people who drive cars with the number of people with vowels in their name.

He argues that

If you’re taking shared readership of print products into account, then surely you’d also need to factor in people reading newspaper website content without ever being logged as a visitor to the site?

That is people visiting through RSS,aggregation etc and therefore according to Dan

the numbers are far less important than looking at data trends. I’d much rather base a theory or business strategy on a few years of data showing a rise in one area and a fall in another. The numbers are rough guides to point towards when the trends are in the same area, but that’s all.

The rational for digital

The Christian Science monitor's decision to end its print version got a lot of coverage when it was announced.

Here they have produced a video explaining their concept

How to turn 44,000 into 6,600-journalists that is

This is the number of journalists that you would need if all of America's papers were to go online as Ken Doctor explains:

Let's figure there are 44,000 journalists left in US newsrooms, an up-to-date tally hard to come up with. So, if the industry magically flipped that switch tomorrow, we've got an estimate of how many online-only published could pay: 6600 journalists, and that's at the optimistic 15% number. Of course, many papers don't need to and won't flip the switch; recall that the US news industry should still take in $36 billion+ in revenues this year (down from $47 billion in 2005). But the number -- 6600 -- sticks in your brain.

Ht-Jay Rosen

Pew says online rise is not competing with online growth

This report,from Pew calls it the unmistakable trend for newspapers in the states.

Fewer Americans are reading print newspapers as more turn to the internet for their news. And while the percentage of people who read newspapers online is growing rapidly, especially among younger generations, that growth has not offset the decline in print readership.

The figures-well 39% say they read a paper be it in print or online but the proportion that read a print copy has declined in two years and these tend to be the Baby boomers those born between 1946-1964 with online growth coming from the so called X and Y generations.

When users went online

news consumers were asked what websites they used most often for news and information, Web portals and familiar names dominated