Countdown to Cape Town: Denmark; the reinvention of the paid-for newspaper

 
Free news is, and always will be a fact of life for paid-for newspapers. Whereas words used to have a monopoly on paid news, radio and television being broadcast free of charge to the consumer, now with the Internet and free papers, it is becoming increasingly difficult to charge for words. In this respect, Seidenfaden will focus his Cape Town speech to help participants learn how to reinvent themselves using Politiken as a case study.  

When it comes to the home delivered free papers, Seidenfaden doesn’t feel that they have a sustainable business model: “Nobody knows if the people who receive those papers are actually reading them, making it difficult to convince advertisers, and the costs of distribution are extremely high.” But free paper hand-outs and free Internet articles are not going to disappear. Thus, paid-for quality dailies must offer readers something unique, which is why Seidenfaden set about remolding Politiken.

Seidenfaden sees his paper as a hybrid medium giving equal weight to print and digital: “We need to take both seriously. The news we produce for the Net is also the foundation for the stories that the print product must provide. At the end of the day, we choose the most important stories from the Net and print them in the paper.”

In the printed edition, the Politiken newsroom produces unique features like weeklies have been doing for years. “We have broken the old newsroom contract: Do you have something new for me? Now we ask, do you have something interesting for me,” explained Seidenfaden. Articles in the print edition are now more analytical and include narratives and i-witness accounts among other formats. Readers nearly always know the core of the story but remain interested because Politiken presents it from a different angle, with new information and commentary.  

From the point of view of the journalists, Seidenfaden said that he had little trouble convincing the newsroom that the Web was better for breaking news and that the print edition needed to be differentiated. But he added that a change in a newsroom culture must be gradual.

As for resources, the paper’s reinvention was a zero-sum game: 25 more journalists, those best at getting the news out as quickly as possible, were reserved for the Internet side of operations, increasing that staff 4-fold. The number of print journalists dropped from about 175 to 150. Seidenfaden doesn’t believe in fully integrating the newsroom to the extent that all journalists should work across all media. “We want to preserve the integrity of both media. The Net is for speed, print for quality. We don’t want our journalists working both at the same time.” Although they are not integrated, the Editor-in-Chief noted that both staff still work very closely together.

Politiken is a model for all traditional paid-for dailies struggling with an ever-commoditized news landscape. Come to Cape Town to hear Toger Seidenfaden’s whole speech to learn how to reinvent your own newspaper.  
Source: John Burke, Editors Weblog