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Back in 2001, the Guardian newspaper asked, "Where have all the women gone?", and it is a question that has plagued the editors of leading British newspapers for the past two decades as only 41% of women - 10.3 million - read a daily UK newspaper (October to March 2008).
 
Genevieve Roberts, a former features writer and reporter for The Independent, now an advertising planner for McCann Erickson on the Evening Standard account, told me: "Almost every newspaper is trying to appeal to female readers. In crude commercial terms, females are the main shoppers in more than 50% of households, and advertisers want to appeal to people who shop so they have the opportunity to buy their product."

This is the crux of the issue, advertising is now more than ever driving the bottom-line of newspapers, and it is crucial that newspapers attract the right demographic to appeal to advertising agencies and businesses.

Without female readers, the advertisers will look elsewhere.

The Glossy Magazine Approach

Newspapers are tackling this problem in two distinctly different ways: the glossy/gossip magazine approach and the female interest approach.

Daily Mirror
(From July 2007 to December 2007: Female = 43%)

Daily Mirror Editor Richard Wallace has discretely changed the focus of the newspaper from the traditional male-orientated tabloid to appeal to women who buy popular weekly gossip magazines.

Andrew Higton, a sub-editor at The Mirror, told me that this marketing approach has involved a significant change in culture for the staff. Editors, reporters and sub-editors are often told to make copy more "female-friendly". This new approach is applied at all levels, for example, when President Nicolas Sarkozy of France visited the UK, subs were told to focus much of the story on Carla Brunei's outfits.

The Daily Mirror's shift towards the glossy magazine style has also involved changing the look of the whole newspaper in an attempt to make it more visually appealing to the female market. The newspaper has now gone full-colour, redesigned its features pages, covers female issues such as family life and children, and it contains more celebrity-focused pictures alongside the news stories.

Daily Express

This is also the approach that Richard Desmond's Daily Express is following. The newspaper is using its experience in the magazine market (Richard Desmond is the proprietor of the increasingly popular weekly glossy magazine, "OK!") to attract women readers. It is also the path that several of the new free daily newspapers are following, such as The London Paper, which regularly features celebrity stories on its front page.

The Female Interest Approach

Daily Mail

However, Helen Lewis, sub-editor at the Daily Mail, said to me that she is not so sure that the glossy magazine route is correct. She told me, "The problem lies in conflating 'female interest' with 'celebrity story', and although it's been a successful formula, I think it's one that's coming to the end of its usefulness in terms of shifting copies."

The Daily Mail is the most successful newspaper in the UK in terms of attracting female readers. In 1995 (Jan to Dec) 49% of its readers were female, in 2006 (Jan to Dec) this had grown to 52% and the figures for 2007 show that it had held onto this 52% demographic. The Daily Mail enjoys more female than male readers. However, it has not completely gone down the celebrity gossip/magazine style. Undoubtedly it does feature these kinds of stories, but it balances this with news stories and a style proven to attract female readers. According to the National Readership Survey, women care about news - it being their "main reason for purchase" - but they like to be told pretty briskly what has happened, but not what it all may or may not mean. The survey also indicates that British women are turned off by sport and are not too keen on finance.

A quick glance at the Daily Mail after reading this data shows how the Daily Mail has struck the right balance to appeal to the female demographic.

Genevieve Roberts told me during an interview on this issue: "In the UK, the Daily Mail has the highest percentage of female readers, and unsurprisingly, this increases its appeal for advertisers."

The Times
(From July 2007 to December 2007: Female = 42%)

The Times deliberately targets females with its T2 supplement magazine, just as the Guardian (from July 2007 to December 2007: Female = 46%) targets females with its supplement magazine, G2.

These magazins are not aimed solely at women, but The Times' chose to advertise to females when it re-launched the supplement, indicating the importance of female readers to this publication. In a £1m-plus campaign, they targeted a cross-section of women: professionals, housewives and mothers.

Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal Online appears to agree with The Times and the Daily Mail's approach for attracting female readers. In May of this year it launched a new section aimed at a female audience, however, it is also not going down the glossy magazine route. WSJ Online executive editor Alan Murray told Reuters, "Our experience has shown us that there are a lot of business and professional women out there who crave not just fashion and beauty advice, but an intelligent news-oriented community where they can share experiences and swap ideas."

Early indicators point to the Female Interest Approach as having the most success, but only time will tell which strategy works in the long run. The battle lines have been drawn in one of the world's most aggressive newspaper markets, and it is certainly a battle that other editors will watch with interest.

Sources: Newspaper Marketing Agency, Brand Republic, Reuters

In April 2007, French regional newspaper Le Télégramme launched an original online offer: a miniature, daily, television-type news report.

At the time, the experiment was hailed as most innovative in the French regional paper landscape. Has that particular format borne its fruits though?

Télégramme and JT Web

The paper built a studio within its newsroom at a relatively low cost, about €70,000 including two professional cameras, an editing console and lighting. The paper hired a professional broadcast journalist to produce daily video footage with professional standards (about one original report daily, sometimes two). The actual news show, dubbed 'JT Web', lasts about five minutes. It is staffed by four of the paper's journalists, who come from diverse backgrounds and desks, on a rotating basis. It is published every weekday at 5pm.

Each journalist compiles video content shot by the videojournalist, gets a share of his or her own footage or carries out short interviews with the paper's journalists, and serves as an anchor for the news report. Each underwent a 4-week training program. They attend the morning news meeting and pick out the stories that will have most visual relevance.

The JT Web has helped to expand Le Télégramme's multimedia coverage. However, the televised format of the JT Web has borne disappointing results traffic-wise. Of the roughly 40,000-50,000 daily unique visitors to the website, there are only between 1,000-3,500 video downloads, depending on the news event.

In these baby steps of online video though, editors shouldn't be excessively concerned by eyeballs, as the JT Web served more important purposes, helping to modernize the newsroom's culture.

Video fueled newsroom convergence

The 'JT Web' was launched with two main purposes. One was to "surf on the growing enthusiasm for video news coverage" that was emerging on all the major international news sites, said Olivier Clech, Digital editor at Le Télégramme. Secondly - and as importantly in Clech's view - the JT Web was a good way to engage in cultural change within the newsroom (which isn't integrated but Clech would like it to be), by creating curiosity amongst journalists.

"Video was a lever to trigger evolution," he said. It was both used to fulfill the audience's needs and made journalists " realize that multimedia was inevitable." This doesn't mean that all of the paper's 200 journalists will regularly produce multimedia coverage, but the JT Web was a good way to make them more Web-friendly.

For the last municipal elections in March 2008, the Télégramme organized diverse video coverage to complement its print and online stories. Video interviews were shot with editors of the paper's local editions ("100% print people") to discuss the details of the elections. On election day, the Télégramme gathered spontaneous reactions from voters and politicians, and provided video analysis from its main offices.



Newspaper video: towards on-demand, news YouTubes

According to Clech, the JT Web's televised news format was a good way for the paper to tackle video, since it required a rigorous and structured approach. But it doesn't fall in line with the expectations of the online audience, "which is a more of a consumer of short video sequences." Most Web users seek short and diversified on-demand clips. The JT Web may have also suffered from insufficient visibility on the homepage, lack of broadband penetration and a relatively slow server.

In the future, the JT Web could be scrapped, or perhaps the Télégramme will save this format for talk shows, profiles or select news items. The TV news report format simply doesn't bring enough people. And there seems to be a disconnect between waiting on videos of 'hot' breaking news until the 5pm news report, instead of publishing them immediately.

Clech couldn't give too many details, but the paper is working on its next set of video offerings, which could include a larger selection of on-demand video clips, which users could freely browse. Content would be more systematically indexed to make it easy for readers to find and share. Sounds familiar? Perhaps there could even be some participatory features...

Last but not least, Clech reminded: "Let's not focus on the platform, and instead keep doing our jobs." That's the secret.


Stay tuned for Part 2, with an interview with Ian Vaile, Director of Digital Productions at Fairfax Media in Australia.

Source: Olivier Clech, Digital Editor-in-Chief at Le Télégramme

US freesheets, after lukewarm early years compared to their European equivalents, seem to be bucking the trend of decreasing revenues suffered by urban paid-for dailies.

Rue89.com was founded in May by four former journalists and bloggers from the French leftist daily Libération. Within months, the online-only news site unearthed a few scoops and became a recognized independent source in the French media landscape, ranking first among French news sites for time spent, ahead of newspapers, according to Nielsen NetRatings. One of its founders and director, Pierre Haski, tells the Editors Weblog how Rue89 found a working compromise to pro-am journalism.

Launched two weeks ago, LePost.fr is not your typical online-only news site. With a resolutely ‘new media’ approach to news, the website fearlessly tackles new trends in news consumption, and caters to a younger public generally perceived as having deserted the arena. Its editorial content and processes have been adapted to this aim, which can also be seen as a traditional media publisher’s attempt to experiment with the future of online news.

TimesofOman.com is the leading English-language news portal in Oman. The print newsroom counts 30 staffers, whereas the online version only counts three. The website, which was re-launched in November 2006, receives on average 80,000 views per day. Cariappa A A, web editor of Times of Oman, explains how such a small team can put up a quality website daily, through efficient time management and adapted content.

These two ideas are unrelated, but they can help to pull in readers at low cost. In its Sunday editions, The San Diego Union-Tribune offered football tickets for the playoffs. On the other side of the spectrum, USA Today included in its redesign a reporter index, which lists all reporters and offers a one-click access to their profile or all of their stories.

One of this year’s major trends in newsrooms was the generalized evolution of the newsroom itself, into what was dubbed ‘integrated newsrooms’. Gannett came up with its own innovative version though, the Local Information Center (IC). The Editors Weblog interviewed one of the main engines of this venture, Jennifer Carroll, Vice President of New Media Content at Gannett Corporation.

Friday 24^th of November, a good 80 Dutch and Flemish editors and researchers gathered in the European Journalism Centre, Maastricht, Netherlands, to assess and discuss several prototypes of novel newspaper products or services. All are web-based one way or another, and ready for the Web 2.0 publishing environments. The in total six demonstrators feature remote reporting tools, video content based on strategic alliances with non-journalistic partners, e-paper trials and online reader communities. Most were developed in close cooperation with specialised R&D centres. Together, the prototypes reveal the contours of the future electronic newspaper.
Al least half of the demonstrators will make it to real applications, the other are subject to further testing in living lab conditions.
General conclusion of the event: we need further experimentation to capture the essence of digital presence. In the conference report, the applications as well as the editors’ appraisal are described more in detail.

Some would say that the Web has facilitated the job of the journalist. Others would say the tasks of online journalists are much more complex. Journalists at the Wall Street Journal are of the latter opinion, rebelling against a management that they feel is demanding too much.

The Bakersfield Californian is regularly used as the example of a local paper that has embraced and succeeded in the world of new media. Dan Pacheco, Senior Manager of Digital Products for the paper addressed the audience at the first World Digital Publishing Conference in London.

Despite their short existence, podcasts are one of the fastest growing new media of Web 2.0. Having only emerged in mid-2004, by the end of 2005 'podcast' was the New Oxford American Dictionary's word of the year. Newspapers looking to innovate have rapidly adopted podcasts as part of their everyday news production, some providing morning news summaries to which readers who may not have the time to read during their commute can listen. The Editors Weblog spoke with three editors in charge of their respective paper's daily podcasting to find out the steps they're taking in integrating podcasting into their newsrooms.

The Bakersfield Californian has been making headlines in new media for some time due to their innovative approach to reforming the newspaper. The local daily has even added a staff position to deal with some of these innovations; a Citizen Journalism editor. The blog Journalism Hope recently did an interview with the man that presently holds that position, Ray Hacke.

An interesting article from Alan Jacobson on Brass Trks Design considering newspaper redesign, using "real world data from real newspapers." Jacobson begins by dismissing 'such 'wisdom' as: Be creative! Think outside the box! Convert to Tab!" He adds that tabloid conversion results have been 'mixed'.

If our last posting about the obstacles in the way of online newspaper success made you curious, below are a few ideas for the future of online business models. The results will ultimately benefit journalism.

Vice President of advertising for the Newspaper Association of America, Mort Goldstrom made a quote in an article about Craigslist at SmartMoney.com that deserves some attention. He said, "I think that newspapers have been very quick to adapt online."

Mr. Goldstrom is definitely too quick to pat newspapers on the back.

If our last posting about the obstacles in the way of online newspaper success made you curious, below are a few ideas for the future of online business models. The results will ultimately benefit journalism.

Vice President of advertising for the Newspaper Association of America, Mort Goldstrom made a quote in an article about Craigslist at SmartMoney.com that deserves some attention. He said, "I think that newspapers have been very quick to adapt online."

Mr. Goldstrom is definitely too quick to pat newspapers on the back.